Archive for the ‘Build’ Category

“You pledge to get a mammogram. We pledge to make it easy”

If you reside in Orange County, you may recall seeing the “Pinky Pledge” street team and print ads this spring and summer traveling throughout southern Orange County spreading awareness about mammograms with Mission Hospital. Each year this hospital takes on breast cancer through dynamic targeted mini campaigns to help women stay ahead of this disease. Mission Hospital focuses their efforts on the importance of early breast cancer detection through regular mammography screenings. The hospital’s goal was to increase screening volume by receiving 1,000 sign-ups across their two campuses, Mission Viejo and Laguna Beach. (more…)

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There’s a lot of dribbling this month, especially from the mouths of our King’s Hawaiian college basketball FANATICS! Because as we know, there’s nothing sweeter than watching your favorite team take it to the hoop, while devouring King’s Hawaiian® tasty bread and rolls. So, we teamed up with our island buddies to create an irresistibly delicious bracket of recipes that the whole “ohana” can enjoy and share! (more…)

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We have teamed up with our financially savvy and musically inclined buddies at freecreditscore.com to deliver their fans with a “pop-up blog” that will rock the RSS feeds!

Now until March 20^th, our Buddies will be deploying a blog every hour on the hour highlighting the best of SXSW, including; Austin’s local flavor, interviews with numerous bands, previews and recaps of live performances and their favorite score of the day right from the center of all the action! (more…)

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When it comes to the toy industry in Japan, Tomica is one of the most recognized brands, with 90-percent of Japanese kids familiar with the line of die-cast cars, trains and accessories. Tomica, owned by the toy giant, the TOMY Corporation, enjoys the level of popularity comparable to the Legos phenomenon in America. Early in 2010, on the heels of its 40^th anniversary, the company made the strategic move to debut the brand to North America in September 2010. The release included select toys offered exclusively through Toys”R” Us in the first retail year, including seven die-cast car sets, three train sets, six accessory sets, six destination sets and five deluxe play sets. (more…)

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Big Spaceship recently released a pretty cool app for Altoids that allows you to “Tune Out” your, let’s say ‘more undesirable’ friends on Facebook essentially giving you more control over who you really want to hear from via status updates and wall posts. We think it’s an awesome app, and one much needed after countless months (years?!) of friend aggregating that create a whole lot of white noise you seriously couldn’t care less about. (more…)

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Before you Go Somewhere New, Learn from Where you’ve Been

Ten years ago, who would have guessed that our lives would revolve around the Internet? Personally, I was thinking we’d be flying cars by now; but that’s beside the point. The bottom line is that our lives are digitally saturated. Of course, with everything humans create, there comes plenty of drama. As our Chief Buddy noted in the previous post, take the Adobe vs. Apple debate…not to be outdone by iPhone vs. Android…then there’s the Facebook privacy issues. The list goes on and on. Which leads us to the question: Where exactly are we going next? As one of the Associate Directors of Development at The Buddy Group, here’s a screenshot from the frontline: (more…)

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Feeding PC enthusiasts’ voracious appetite for speed has never been easy. But Western Digital managed to outpace even the fastest SATA hard drives on the market (including its own 300GB VelociRaptor) with the new 450GB and 600GB VelociRaptor. Packing 10,000 RPMs and up to twice the capacity, WD once again dominates the market with the world’s fastest SATA drive.

As WD’s partner, The Buddy Group was lucky enough to be tasked with helping to promote this powerful beast online. Working at VelociRaptor speeds, we needed to produce an online digital presentation that would top everything and anything WD had done before. In essence, we needed to bring the VelociRaptor machine to life in a microsite and (2) 30-second videos (one to play on the microsite and another version for YouTube). All of the projects would need to integrate imagery of the original velociraptor–a 75 million-year-old carnivorous dinosaur. The micro site would be translated into 14 languages!

Needless to say, the videos had to be fast-paced and visually exciting–an experience that even the most hardened PC enthusiast could get, well, enthusiastic about. To top it off, in order to meet the aggressive VelociRaptor product launch date, we only had about a month from start to finish for a project that could easily require three months. Think of every digital production step imaginable, from ideation, storyboard presentation, client approvals, 3D animation and wireframe, more client approvals, sound mixing, review screenings and then final client approvals. Keep in mind that every second of animation can equal hours of digital production time; so even the smallest changes made during the process are a big production (no pun intended).

Luckily, we have a state-of-the-art video production studio, DotLot. We also have a crew of very talented animators, designers, production managers and motion graphics and sound specialists—plus an executive producer and account executive to keep it all on track.

Creatively, the idea behind the video was to bring viewers inside the VelociRaptor hard drive virtual world in a fast pace, 3D-Tron-inspired visual experience. Viewers would get a sneak peek at the machine’s impressive internal working mechanisms and boast-worthy specs. The microsite would feature a red-eyed VelociRaptor, eerily staring at you and following your movements as you scroll the mouse–waiting to pounce on its prey.

The reaction we got from the final video screening was in a word, killer… Actually, in our clients’ words, according to Jai Lozan, Western Digital Sr. Marketing Specialist, “This is unlike any video we have done before for a new product presentation.”

Catch the new WD VelociRaptor video on YouTube at http://ow.ly/1FiXZ and see it on the micro site at http://ow.ly/1w9iD.

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We have been dying to share this with you but until now, have been sworn to secrecy. But, we’ve been given the green flag, so off we go!

Mattel challenged us to create an interactive, choose your own adventure video experience for a new Hot Wheels product. The response was…well…to say we were excited would be a huge understatement.

We have been producing interactive, non-linear videos for a while now. Heck, we even worked with Pointroll back in 2005 to create an industry nomenclature for interactive video: Pause-to-Play; Relational Hotspotting; Choose Your Interactive Adventure; and, of course, Green Screen Overlay (see it here ). However, the Hot Wheels challenge was different. We set out to produce this entire experience using stop motion photography. Best of all, the video was produced to live on YouTube’s Annotation Platform (NOTE: YouTube is also a client).

The experience has been nothing short of phenomenal.

Filmed on location in our DotLot studios, we produced the videos using three cameras, capturing more than 9,000 still frames, used 85 pounds of sugar (how else can we make it snow on Whiteout Mountain?!) and 100 pounds of sand. Our motion graphics team created explosions, avalanches and crashes that all help feed play-time imaginations. The custom sound design enhances the users’ immersion into the thrilling racing experience.

The video showcases the new line of Hot Wheels Custom Motors toys by enticing users into a series of Custom Motors Cup racing circuits. Players compete as Pit Crew Chief and race three courses in a chase for the Cup. After selecting one of two cool new Custom Motors vehicles, the key to victory then lies in choosing the right vehicle configuration for each of the three different tracks. The tracks start with a traditional racetrack and then progress to more treacherous off-road tracks. The game’s many permutations make it fun and challenging, so users want to play again and again in an effort to lead their team to victory.

We couldn’t be more proud of the end result. And because we know you are probably just as geeky about the “how to” as we are, look for a making-of video in the coming weeks to see how it all came together.

To get hooked on the Hot Wheels Custom Motors Cup game, go to http://www.youtube.com/user/HOTWHEELS.

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