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DISEÑO EN BUENOS AIRES ERIK ALMÅS UNDERWARE COLLE+McVOY JILLIAN TAMAKI EXHIBIT INTERACTIVE ANNUAL 17

INTERACTIVE ANNUAL 35 AWARD-WINNING PROJECTS SHOWCASING THE BEST OF INTERACTIVE DESIGN

ADVERTISING

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ENTERTAINMENT

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EXPERIMENTAL + INFORMATION DESIGN + SELF-PROMOTION

March/April 2011 Twenty-Four Dollars www.commarts.com

by Ruth Hagopian

erikalmås C

limbers from all over the world flock to Krabi, a beach town in southern Thailand with fine white sand and limestone cliffs. Photographer Erik Almås scouts the landscape by speedboat, looking for any angle that will reveal its natural beauty in a fresh way. The next day he’s hanging from a cliff with a camera around his neck, harnessed to a rock and shooting the shoreline 500 feet below. Later he blogs, “I’m amazed about the places my camera takes me. And yes, it takes me.”

Last year, his camera took him to 50 locations on four continents to shoot landscapes, lifestyle and fashion for global tourism. For this article, I tracked Almås from Seychelles off the east coast of Africa and on to Mauritius, Malta, Rome, Paris, Los Angeles, Vancouver, his home and studio in San Francisco and his second studio in Brooklyn, New York. He enjoys the pace and, at 38, is intense and energetic, exuding both confidence in his photographic skills and humility about his shifting roles of craftsman and artist. The camera also leads Almås to sky dive, parachute or scuba dive—whatever it takes to get the job done.

His resolve works well when a photo of sand and sea needs that extra spark. Almås asked a client who wanted a water shot, “What if we go up in one of these paragliders for a firstperson perspective?” His ideal spot was too shallow for a boat so he shot it from the air while dangling from the paraglider’s fabric wing. “Then I went up in what they called a micro plane, basically a hang glider with an engine on it,” he said.

“It’s crazy—the thing was so light—it was just bumping around. I took the aerial shot and I combined the two.”

Whether he finds a parachute, a helicopter or a plane, “even if that plane is not certified for aviation, I’ll just get into it, jump around and get something beautiful.” His enthusiasm is a natural extension of his earliest days behind the camera shooting ski action for fun. The native Norwegian originally planned to attend a small community college and shoot sports events for a local newspaper, but a meeting with a photographer who had studied in the U.S. convinced him to apply to the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Three months later, he was on his way.

The Academy’s photography program was his first introduction to image-making as art. When instructor Susan Schelling asked her students to complete a portrait assignment called “The Poetic Talent of a Glance,” Almås learned the difference between creating pictures and taking pictures. His suite of black-and-white prints was voted best portfolio at graduation and he immediately began an apprenticeship with noted commercial photographer Jim Erickson.

“Jim always encouraged me and my work,” Almås said of his mentor, “and marketing is one of the things I learned from him. He’s had a successful 30-year career and he’s done so by marketing consistently.” Almost three years into his work as Erickson’s assistant, the dot-com recession hit California and reduced business dramatically. Almås was laid off and spent months doing freelance retouching while racking up $50,000 of credit card debt.

Averaging one job every two or three months, he felt he was going nowhere. It was time to retreat to Norway—until a prophetic encounter with a stranger in a blue turban changed

Right: “Commissioned by 7×7 magazine in January 2010 to feature model Maggie Rizer’s recent move to San Francisco.” Ben Hardiman, creative director; Shannon Dunn, stylist; Scott Doorman, illustrator; 7×7, client.

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interactive annual 17: advertising

Big Boston Warm-up: Lands’ End “Excellent data visualization and touching music for a very valuable cause.”

—Véronique Brossier

The Big Boston Warm-up sponsorship was an initiative to collect a coat for every homeless person in Boston (7,681 according to the previous year’s www.firstbornmultimedia.com/websites/159_lands_end_big_boston_warmup census), and this online hub corresponded with an installation assembled in Boston. On the site, users could raise social awareness about poverty in the city, track donations and inspire friends to donate. Completely unified content and navigation created an online environment that revealed the magnitude of the physical exhibit and broadcasted people’s interaction with the campaign through dynamic visuals.

Overview:

• Meetings began at the end of July and the project launched October 1—in plenty of time to collect coats for the holiday season.

• Whenever a coat was donated, a unique code could track the donation on the site. Coat submissions were entered each day and instantly reflected on the site in an interactive timeline (with the current number of donated coats) and a map with a detailed breakdown of donations by area.

• A public art installation of 768 figures (each figure stood for 10 people) was used to show progress toward the goal of collecting coats and donors.

Tony Yoo, junior designer Patrick O’Boyle, Lands’ End/Laura O’Brien, Lands’ End, writers Michael Kuzmich/Brett Swanson, 3-D designers Aaron Pollick, associate creative director Adam Smith, Lands’ End, creative director Ken Bak/Phil Baudoin/Miller Medeiros, developers Dofl Yun, technical lead Francis Turmel, technology director Brett Swanson, sound designer Crystinue Cho, executive producer T. Jay Maddox, Lands’ End/Richard Swaziek, Lands’ End, project managers Firstborn, project design and development Lands’ End (Dodgeville, WI), client

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“Wonderful animation combined with compelling statistics makes it hard not to look through all of its content.”

—Adrian Belina

Comments by Aaron Pollick: Was the topic/subject of the project a new one for you?

“Creating a site that addresses homelessness was a new kind of project; the challenge was crafting a motivating story that everyone could relate to, from research that consisted of numbers and statistics. Essentially, our challenge was to make census data interesting.”

What was different about this project as compared to others?

“The great thing about working on the Big Boston Warm-up was creating a site that extended a real-world initiative into the digital space. It really showed how we can blend online and offline experiences into a single cohesive story. The original installation was going to be one statue representing one homeless person; it quickly became apparent to the client that this wouldn’t be possible. We were able to accomplish it online and use the visual of the sculpture to tell a much deeper story. It was a rare opportunity to use advertising to spread awareness for a good cause.”

“The response was amazing, and exceeded our goal—we received over 7,800 coats in Boston.

Part way through development, Lands’ End was so excited by the concept that they decided to go national with it. Over 33,000 coats were donated nationwide.”

What was the response?

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interactive annual 17: entertainment

The NFB Test Tube with David Suzuki “A new type of cinematography—documentary with interactivity as an editing experience.”

—Véronique Brossier

Overview: Combining user input, interactive video of Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki and live data from Twitter, this site is an interactive parable about society’s insatiable appetites, the fallacy of growth and the things that can and cannot be changed. Delivered online and on mobile devices, it presents a social experiment that demonstrates how all seven billion people in the world are connected by a simple mathematical reality. After the audience responds to the question, “If you could find an extra minute right now, what would you do?,” David Suzuki delivers a video story while surrounded by dynamic floating bacteria—seemingly random objects that are actually related to visitor input (a mouse click on them opens up additional layers of content).

• The site pulls data live from Twitter so the experience is never the same twice and built-in calls to action encourage questions and dialogue to continue across social networks.

• The iPhone/iPad apps share the same engine as the Web site so all data is cross-pollinated between Web and mobile platforms.

• The site received 40,000 visitors and 22,000 content submissions in the first two weeks, as well as over 1,000 tweets and 20,000 referrals from Facebook.interactive. nfb.ca/#/testtube.

National Film Board of Canada (Vancouver, Canada), producer The Vacuum Design, project design and development

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testtube.nfb.ca

“Leverages the interactive medium to reveal connections and relationships that would be difficult to demonstrate in traditional media.”

—Jill Nussbaum

Comments by The Vacuum Design: “The topic of this project was something relatively new for us to be exploring in design. All of us are passionate about the environment so to be able to take a step back from commercial work and find creative and visual solutions for an important topic, was quite a breath of fresh air (was that a pun?).”

Was the topic/subject of the project a new one for you?

“Scientist and environmentalist David Suzuki, using the analogy of a common lab experiment, tells a parable that illustrates the concept of exponential growth. But before he begins, the audience is asked a simple question: If you had an extra minute what would you do? After an answer is submitted, Suzuki begins to deliver his parable while the screen fills with dynamic floating ‘bacteria’ each representing a real-time tweet that directly relates to the visitor-submitted answer. The rapid interconnectedness with other people around the globe through tweets underscores Suzuki’s analogy. The site visualizes all of the thousands of responses entered into it, for another layer of meaning about the things we do and consume. In the end, the project demonstrates that—despite beliefs that we’re all unique and special—we’re not alone in the choices we make. We’re all connected, and it’s up to us collectively to figure out the best way to live.”

How did the content determine the design concept?

“Drawing and animating hundreds of objects (the tweets) on-screen without completely destroying the performance of the piece. We had to be very careful about how we constructed those objects to keep performance overhead low. With the video playing such an important role in the experience, we needed to figure out ways to keep everything running smoothly.”

What was the greatest technical challenge?

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