I had a little time to kill yesterday on the campus of NUI Maynooth. It’s also home to St. Patrick’s College – a Pontifical University.
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St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth
Tag: work
Virgin Media January Sale
For January 2018, Virgin Media had a sale with no catches, no hidden costs and no long contracts to sign – it’s the ‘What you see is what you get’ sale.
30″ Broadband & Phone ad
20″ Broadband ad
20″ Virgin Mobile TV ad
Portraits
I’m doing portraits for the BBDO Dublin staff page on the website at the moment. Here’s a few I like so far.
The Virgin Media Night Run
There’s a unique atmosphere about the city at night – a heightened, more focused and intimate experience.
For their second year of sponsoring the Virgin Media Night Run, we wanted to evoke this feeling, coupled with the adrenaline rush of participating and competing in one of the most exciting sporting events of the year.
The cornerstone of the campaign was a 40 second video that ran on Youtube, RTE Player, Virgin Media’s website and social channels. This was supported by outdoor, radio, print and digital ads.
As well as Art Directing the campaign (with the exception of the outdoor, art directed by Niamh Fahey) I also took 360 and still photos for social and digital use.
#BurnBrighter
Bord Gáis Energy Theatre
On the second night of a night shoot last week, I took this at about 12.30am in Grand Canal Square, in front of the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in Dublin, Ireland.
It’s a bit noisy, because the GoPro currently won’t expose longer than 1/4sec when shooting RAW. Kinda frustrating since it can stay open for 60 seconds when shooting to JPG, but hopefully they’ll sort that out with a firmware update soon.
Your face when…
TV Stings for a Virgin Mobile (Ireland) sponsorship of comedy on RTE.
Instantainment
Tactical TV campaign for Virgin Media Ireland. Three 20 second spots.
Pressure on the pipes
Superfast. Ultrafast. Uberfast. Lightning fast. What does it all actually mean? It means that when the going gets tough and there’s “pressure on the pipes”, Virgin Media broadband powers on when the competitor’s broadband crumbles. As this campaign playfully demonstrates…
As part of this campaign, we extended the story of Frank’s weekend and created an online conversation between himself and his girlfriend that ran as VOD and pre-roll support for the TV ad.
The campaign also included rich-media display ads
and instore display
Booyah!
Virgin Media is officially Ireland’s fastest broadband network – certified by Ookla Speedtest. This outdoor and press creative connects Virgin Media and speed in no uncertain terms.
aaaaaand, with a few more words, here’s one for press…
Game of Drones
Virgin Media is officially Ireland’s fastest broadband network – according to Ookla. To celebrate that, and just to have fun, we dreamed up and made this: a superslick game that shows off the power of 360Mb broadband and Virgin Media’s new mobile offering – by allowing users to control the drone from our latest TV spot with their mobile phone.
The game featured in rich media ads online, in social media channels, on Virgin Media Ireland’s website and on interactive screens in retail outlets.
Putting myself in harm’s way, for safety’s sake
Here’s a set of videos I shot recently at Irish International for the Road Safety Authority (RSA), to help raise awareness of cyclist’s safety on the road. They were published through the RSA’s social channels during National Bike Week (11th-19th June 2016).
The scenes look dangerous, from the cyclist’s perspective, intentionally. These videos were shot in 360 to give people a first-hand view of what it’s like, when motorists aren’t aware of cyclists or don’t consider their safety. Although there’s plenty of opportunity to observe this kind of behaviour during the course of an average cycle on Irish roads, I did bring along a driver to play the part of the inconsiderate motorist.
I don’t get a chance to cycle often, so it was an eye-opening experience for me. Some of the hazards weren’t actually that apparent while on the bike. When you’re cycling, you tend to focus on the road and the repetitive effort. Quite often you may be listening to music and you may place your trust in other road users to avoid you. Cycling along the country road, I was less aware of the traffic coming from behind, so the potential threat is more obvious in the video. But of course, it was there, even if it wasn’t on my mind at the time. What was also very interesting about this project, was to place the camera on the car, and see what it looked like from the driver’s perspective. The camera was mounted on the driver’s door (in the ‘door-opening’ video) and on the front wing of the car in the overtake video, giving a clearer view than you’d normally get from the driver’s seat.
I’m looking forward to making more of these kinds of videos in the future. 360 VR is a fantastic medium for providing not just an informational piece of film, but also an experience that is a lot closer to actually being involved in the action.
At this time, 360 video is not natively supported on Twitter or Instagram, so I also made non-360 versions for use on those platforms. Working with 360 footage gives you a range of views to select your shots from. From a single sequence, I was able to edit shots looking forwards and also looking backwards from the camera position. 360 video is supported on Facebook and YouTube, as well as many other networks. Some browsers or operating systems, such as Safari, may not allow you to view these videos.
These were shot with a Ricoh Theta S – a deservedly popular entry level 360 camera. It’s a small, light, pocketable camera that is extremely easy to use. It can take decent quality still images. The video output isn’t as good as you’d like it. It shoots HD, and the raw footage looks clean enough, if shot in decent lighting conditions. The 360 player engines in YouTube or Facebook produce a noticeable degradation in quality. This is a rapidly developing area, with many 360 cameras already on the market and some that capture video in 4k. Over the coming months, many more are due to be released and I’m looking forward to getting one of those as soon as possible. However, with the majority of social content being viewed on smartphones, the quality of the Theta video is good enough for now. I would expect support for 360 (with VR options) to be widely, or even universally supported over the next year or so and also for the quality of the picture to improve substantially through the main platforms.
Here are the non-360 edits of the videos.
Origin Green – Cardboard : Bord Bia
At this year’s Expo world fair in Milan the theme was “feeding the planet, energy for life”. Ireland’s Pavilion celebrated Origin Green, Ireland’s world-leading sustainable food movement. We helped create all kinds of interesting material, including this simple, cost-effective and unputdownable Google Cardboard piece, which transported thousands of users from the parched earth of Milan to the lush idyll of the Irish countryside. The Irish Pavilion was a huge success with visitors and critics alike, and won bronze for Ireland out of 145 countries.
Here’s the flat image that I shot.
And here are a few more shots I took on the day.
Pixie’s Adventure
We developed an ad campaign to promote UPC Ireland’s 240mb broadband. Life flows better with Ireland’s fastest broadband. The TV ad tells the story of a dog called Pixie who wanders out while his owner isn’t paying attention, steps on a bus and disappears. A frantic search ensues and through the magic of superfast broadband, and all the lightning fast social media power it gives, Pixie is found, recognised and returned.
For the digital part of the campaign, we thought it’d be nice to extend the story, filling in the gap to show you what Pixie got up to when he stepped off that bus. We hooked Pixie up with a GoPro and brought him out on an adventure of a lifetime.
The 50″ video featured in homepage takeovers. We did a 30″ cut which ran on pre-rolls as well as four different 15″ pre-roll videos.
Here’s a couple of the 15s.
Here’s the TV ad:
We also spent a day in a green screen studio with Pixie, creating content for standard and rich-media digital display as well as for outdoor and instore digital screens. Here’s a pre-roll video of Pixie’s road trip, which was also featured in the outdoor and on a Yahoo login page takeover.
We also produced an interactive video that ran as a masthead on YouTube
Here’s a few shots I took on the beach.
New Ways of Working
UI design concept for a Vodafone business hub.
New life
Sad and all as I was to leave my previous (professional) home, I’m very happy to be settling in to my new job and joining the exceptionally talented team at Target McConnells. It’s getting close to the end of my first week and my appetite is well and truly whetted for the exciting times ahead. On the downside, there’ll be less opportunities for beach sunrise photography, but to offset that loss, I am now within strolling distance of one of Dublin’s finest deli’s, Juniors.
