We are in the middle of an Australia-wide augmented reality campaign for McDonalds’ Loose Change menu. We’ve done augmented reality before, but this project is unique because it is intelligently reactive. Ronald’s response, both verbal and physical, is determined by the audience’s interaction with him.

Audiences were presented with challenges to find loose change. The circumstances were everyday; a couch or a chest of clothes drawers, but the effect was magical. Ronald levitated clothes out of drawers and cushions off the couch, conjured Hamburglar out of thin air to cause mischief and teleported all over the screen like a red-afro firecracker.

The experience was scripted as a branching narrative so that Ronald has a response appropriate to the audience’s interaction. For example, Ronald asks which hand he’s hiding the coin in and if someone walks up and picks the wrong one, he opens his fist to a puff of smoke, an apology and a wisecrack. Pick the right fist and Ronald telekinetically sends a coin out to the audience. We created a number of contingencies for random behaviour; if someone takes photos Ronald will pose for them, if someone cheats Ronald calls them on it, if people crowd the screen Ronald tells them they don’t want to be stepped on by clown feet. From past experiences staging augmented reality we have found that many kids (and some adults) can’t resist physically assaulting the AR characters, so the contingency where Ronald complains that he’s a clown and not a punching bag ended up being triggered a few times.

With almost an hour of content that could be recombined into thousands of script permutations, the audience never saw the same story twice, even if they hung around for the entire 3 hour activation (and quiet a few did).

• Client: McDonalds Australia
• Agency: OMD Fuse
• Experiential: Adhesive
• Production: On
• Director: Oscar Nicholson
• DOP: Warwick Brown
• Compositing: Gawain McGrath
• Sound: Jason Wagner
• Sound design: Tai Rotem
• AR assist: Benji Sorrenson

]]> http://onproductions.com.au/2012/05/10/mcdonald/feed/ 0 http://onproductions.com.au/2012/05/07/indigenous-action/ http://onproductions.com.au/2012/05/07/indigenous-action/#comments Mon, 07 May 2012 01:01:10 +0000 re turn on http://onproductions.com.au/?p=1065 Tweet

We have a crowd-funding campaign raising the funds to produce a short film called Kindred, about a group of Aboriginal people abducted by aliens from the Kimberley Ranges in Western Australia.

Developing the project with writer/producer Josh Bryer, what initially grabbed me about Kindred was its basis in the Wandjina creation myth.

“Long, long ago, when the Earth was soft and had no shape,
the Wandjina came down from the sky in boats, and created
the world and everything in it.

This is why you can still see the image of Wandjina
in the rocks, where they entered. Where their spirits remain.
And the ones who went back, you can still see them too.
In the Milky Way: as lights, moving high above the Earth.”

       - A Dreamtime Story of the Worora tribe, Western Australia

The Wandjina story is told in ancient rock paintings adorning the Kimberley Ranges. Illustrations so eerily reminiscent of our modern conception of aliens or “greys” that they have spawned a conspiracy theory that the indigenous people of Western Australia may have made contact with aliens thousands of years ago.

Written as an opening sequence from a feature film planned for production next year, Kindred will tell the story of an encounter with the modern day ancestors of those who first told the story of the Wandjina. A breakneck 7 minute action sequence detailing their bold escape from an orbiting spaceship that hints at the shattering truth about humanity and the aliens’ place in their tribal beliefs. I can’t wait to make it!

Merry Christmas diggity dawg! Here’s to hoping 2012 brings good change…

A humble little word to say the Mark KICKS ASS! His UKTV ad won a Gold at Promax this year for best television image promo. Gods of awesome awards, may we win many more in 2012 before the world ends…

We had the distinguished pleasure of working with a simply delightful English chap who goes by the rather unusual name of Bear Grylls. Schweppes brought the daredevil face to face with his most daunting challenge yet; Australians. We produced a range of media around the campaign, including online video, Facebook teasers and VNRs used by Channel 9 News, Mornings with Kerri Anne and the 7:30 Report.

I’ve just seen a hilarious video mashup that I’m sure will inspire a video meme like the subtitled Hitler rants that flood YouTube.

As George C Scott sits in a cinema watching a trailer for the latest Adam Sandler “comedy”, his reaction goes from bored, to disgusted, to outright horrified (pretty much identical to my reaction).

It only has 90k hits since writing this, but I think its about to explode as a standalone video and as inspiration for a new series of viral memes. As a mashup, its far easier to make, simply cutting the footage from a key scene of Paul Schrader’s 1979 film Hardcore with a terrible film trailer. But on its own, it isn’t a format that allows for the sort of creativity and wit that the Hitler rant meme encouraged. In any case, let it stand that Paul Bonanno authored this video and the video meme that will follow. Lets see how this plays out…

Last Friday we were dropping angels into people’s laps in Melbourne’s Federation Square as part of the new Lynx Excite campaign!

This augmented reality is an adaptation of a creative concept executed by Grand Visual in the UK. We had to dust off our old trigonometry to get the angel angles right, but the simplest and most effective twist we put on it was to add sound design, which grabbed the attention of those not looking at the screen. We have a few more AR projects in the pipeline, stay tuned!

If you write an article you attribute sources. If you cook your grandmother’s famous deep-fried Mars Bars you give the old girl props. If you forward a link you hat tip the finder. But creatives seem reluctant to indicate where they got their inspiration from.

Granted, inspiration is nebulous to even the most fastidious artist. You’d have to be a pop-culture genius to parse all the sources influencing Kill Bill. At least Tarantino tipped his hat for fellow film geeks. But there’s no doubt that most artists’ ego resist denying originality.

A particularly egregious example of creative plagiarism and the inspiration for this post is the music clip for Kanye West’s “All of the Lights”, which lifts the brilliantly epilepsy-inducing open titles from Gaspar Noe’s “Enter the Void”. Go to 1 minute 10 seconds for the open title rip-off

Director Hype Williams puts his name front and centre, but can’t devote a millisecond of copy to hat tip Gaspar Noe or designer Tom Kan. An artists’ ego might resist the creative hat tip, but the internet makes it easy to figure out the giants’ shoulders they’re stomping all over.

We produced a segment covering the Bondi Surf Sho for Blackberry, which aired on Foxtel’s Fuel TV. Skate legend and Foxtel presenter Corbin Harris guided us through a day that didn’t exactly serve up the surf a surf comp needs, but made up for it in jet ski tow-ins and mechanical surf board stacks.

We recently produced a series of online videos for Pernod Ricard promoting Havana Club rum, shot during a party they held in Brisbane, Queensland. This video was released through a number of news sites and played from the Havana Club Australia Facebook page.

With most shoots, there is often down time during which crew are waiting for the next incident to film and being paid to do so. We’re big on efficiently maximizing content, so we proposed that down time be filled shooting a few cocktail making videos. The additional post-production was packaged as a cost-effective add-on, as much of the motion graphics had to be designed for the principal production and factored into that budget. In online video, particularly on Facebook pages, posting videos at regular intervals is a potent means of engaging and retaining audiences.


With brands like Bacardi shifting their entire online budgets to Facebook, we’re increasingly seeing those online budgets invested in online video production that would customarily have been an above the line expenditure.