An internal project for the Weapon7 agency Christmas card 2012. The Snow Machine was an experiential event in Covent garden featuring a Twitter powered snow machine, an eight ton Mercedes-Benz Unimog and copious amounts of fake snow. Passers by were invited to Tweet #snow to @thesnowmachine Twitter account, this would then cause ten seconds of snow flurry from the snow machine. The event ran all day was seen by thousands of people culminating in over one thousand tweets and gaining newspaper coverage for the agency.
The Building Blocks
The interactive holiday greeting showed Christmas Carole on a journey to perform a festive song at your friend's home. The experience used a combination of Google Street View, Google Maps and satellite imagery, Google Places, and Google's Directions and Geocoding APIs to build the custom, personalised film. Video was composited in real time, and to ensure the Google assets blended seamlessly with the film, every image was dynamically colour graded, alongside motion-tracked user data and Street View images with composited snow and additional effects.
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SocialTwitter
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VideoYouTube
The Team
- Weapon7 www.weapon7.com
- Jeremy Garner, Executive Creative Director
- Pete Giblin, Jnr Copywriter
- Michael Naman, Head of Creative Technology
- Yiannis Poulakas, Technical Director
- Paul Stockdale, Project Manager
- Alex Dunning, Junior Art Director
- Shaban Siddiq, Head of Digital Design
The Stats
- 6 team members working on this project
- 40 total hours of missed sleep
- 100 total hours spent on this project
The Results
We ran a server side Twitter harvester pulling all Tweets with the hash tag #snow that mentioned the @thesnowmachine account. These are stored in a database then a Processing app polls the server for new tweets, turning on the snow machine via serial commands to an Arduino hooked up to a 5v to 240v relay, and pushing a message to Flash app to display the user Twitter name. The Processing app also took a picture of the snow then uploaded the image to the server which made an API call, tweeting back to the user the new image.
