Google Street-view car caught in the reflection outside Refresh.

One of the Google Street View cars recently made a swing by the Refresh Creative Media offices and photographed itself in the reflection of the KFC downstairs. Street View imagery has only recently been made available in Cape Town and allows Google Users to see ...]]>

Google Street-view car caught in the reflection outside Refresh.

One of the Google Street View cars recently made a swing by the Refresh Creative Media offices and photographed itself in the reflection of the KFC downstairs. Street View imagery has only recently been made available in Cape Town and allows Google Users to see buildings and roads by dropping an avatar onto the Google Map (maps.google.co.za). During the Fifa World Cup in South Africa, the Google avatar carries a vuvuzela which we are all hearing quite a lot of lately.

Dropping the avatar onto random locations provides some interesting perspectives on the world. For instance, you soon realise that world is actually quite uninhabited. Try it and you’ll see that 9 times out of 10 there is no building in sight. This phenomenon is known as Empty-World-Syndrome.

Gareth Cliff, the 5fm DJ, was complaining about how South African politicians often “Pull the Race-card” by bringing the issue of race into debate. Gareth asked what a Race-card would look like, so we designed a series and put them on racecard.co.za.

Hayibo put an advert up for us, and we created a Facebook page.

Gareth Cliff, the 5fm DJ, was complaining about how South African politicians often “Pull the Race-card” by bringing the issue of race into debate. Gareth asked what a Race-card would look like, so we designed a series and put them on racecard.co.za.

Hayibo put an advert up for us, and we created a Facebook page.

The Mail & Guardian editor, Chris Roper, called us up to interview us, and Racecard featured on the homepage of mg.co.za.

According to Chris:

Our readers have now started using your Race Card parody in other comments on other stories. How popular culture is created, I guess.

“Sorry village guy, is that the best you can do?

“Please try again (also please get yourself a race card)
“Fred Langley on March 19, 2010, 9:08 am”

Radio 702 then called for a radio interview…but enough was enough.

Germany's Next Top Model winner Lena Gercke

Everyone in Cape Town seems to be somehow connected to the sunshine stealers from Europe who arrive to make their commercials and films in South Africa. Roads get blocked, beaches get swamped with crews and apartments get temporary make-overs. A ...]]>

Germany's Next Top Model winner Lena Gercke

Everyone in Cape Town seems to be somehow connected to the sunshine stealers from Europe who arrive to make their commercials and films in South Africa. Roads get blocked, beaches get swamped with crews and apartments get temporary make-overs. A few people also get well paid and have fancy parties as the money is spread around.

Refresh Creative Media was asked to shoot BTS (Behind the Scenes) footage for an advert with a recent winner of Germany’s Next Top Model, Lena Gercke. Imagine all the changing room action that would need to be captured! Turns out no-one in our office was interested, so I had to organise a freelance team to help me out.

Whoever said that the recession meant cut-backs for advertising must have been looking at another industry… like banking. 15 seconds of filming took 2 days to shoot and several weeks of logistics planning. The whole exercise probably took months all in all, would have involved about 100 people and would have cost around R5million.

With all that money you probably have to start with a great idea for the ad? Imagine a pretty girl goes out onto a balcony in the early morning and kisses an ordinary looking guy as the sun gets up. This was the concept the German Agency had to sell more perfume. So how does all this end up happening and how the hell does it work?

Start with a damn hot model who knows how seduce a camera. Lena Gercke is hot and every time she smiled in my direction my automatic response was to smile back. Every time she didn’t smile at me, I wondered if I had done something wrong. From 4am until 5pm she was “working” at being seductive, which I realised is actually quite hard as I yawned my way through the afternoon.

Commission an arty director. Shizue Dahmen was the choice for this advert. Of Japanese origin with an American accent, this lady took charge of making decisions regarding the mood and the look. Every take looked pretty similar to me, but she found differences in each, which kept everyone hard at work.

Make sure you hire an intense DOP (Director of Photography). Pascal Walder pointed the camera in the right direction and worked with angles and light. Other people sorted out the technical details of the camera like the old-school film that kept running out, and the focus that need to be controlled with the help of a tape-measure.

Another man shouted instructions the whole time in a combination of a South African and an American accent. Turns out he was the Assistant Director and was the guy most worried about the schedule.

My favourite character on the set was the Detailer. A man dressed like a Zen fisherman, he cleaned finger-printed glass, built a small shrine for the perfume bottles, and at one point hacked a curtain down with a pair of scissors after the American/South African accused it of invading a shot.

Just like the credit roll at the end of the movie, this 15 sec ad also had Catering, Production, Stills, Wardrobe, Styling…

If you are wondering if all these people were necessary to make a 15sec advert, I would have to say NO. In addition to the film camera that chewed through expensive 35mm film at 25 frames per second, another cameraman shot movie footage using the new Canon 5D stills camera. The high-definition video that comes out of the 5D is amazing and its operation doesn’t require more than one person.

In my humble opinion, all you need are 3 people. Find one skilled artist to operate a Canon 5D camera, keep the hot model and get her to kiss an ordinary guy like me. OK, it would be pretty difficult for the 3 of us to create a circus of hysteria and party hard enough with the client to make them feel like they got good value for their R5million.

Nic Good, Jeremy Samson, Craig Bruton (Crute) and I are sitting in a coffee shop discussing ideas for a movie. “Big Five…” says Nic, “rock-types!” he adds. Other ideas include filming a road-trip, a climbing version of the Amazing Race, and Jeremy’s last days as a bachelor (he was a single man in those days). ...]]>

Nic Good, Jeremy Samson, Craig Bruton (Crute) and I are sitting in a coffee shop discussing ideas for a movie. “Big Five…” says Nic, “rock-types!” he adds. Other ideas include filming a road-trip, a climbing version of the Amazing Race, and Jeremy’s last days as a bachelor (he was a single man in those days). The whole time, I want to tell everyone about an idea I’ve had regarding the building of Table Mountain…you know the type of imagery – people having lunch on scaffolding, famous skyscrapers in progress. Eventually I find the nerve to bring it up. Fresh Air Crew has made so many cool climbing and adventure movies over the last decades, and I don’t know the first thing about making a movie. Crute and I built the Fresh Air Crew website and during that time we made lists of Fresh Air Crews achievements: 50 countries used as locations, 1.6billion viewers of FAC movies, 8 passports filled, 13 international awards…

We talk more over email, and I write the first draft of a script which is titled “Penetration Peak” on a kitesurfing trip to Mozambique. Tony Dick thinks the script is luke-warm, and Nic expresses doubt. Twakkie from the Most Amazing Show wants to get involved. Justin Hawkins is in. We get an email from Eddy Wedler (not the Pearl Jam singer) who agrees to fly out from Germany to work on the film as an intern. I talk to a Rasta outside our office and convince him that he will make a great presenter.

Day One:
Aaron Hadlow, 5 times Kitesurfing World Champ, agrees to do some tricks over Jeremy who sits on a surfboard out at Table View while Crute films using an underwater camera. Rasta doesn’t pitch. It turns out no-one understands the basic idea and I tell my silly story about building a peak on Table Mountain a thousand times.

Its late afternoon and I am sitting at the top of Jacob’s Ladder on Table Mountain, lowering Jeremy down to the top of the 2^nd pitch for the 5^th time. With one hand in the rail, he takes his harness off and yells for me to pull the rope up. Jeremy’s harness appears and I have a ‘Simon Yates” moment where I feel like I have abandoned my friend. Filming Jeremy solo high up on Table Mountain is freaky, so I concentrate on the view-finder. Crute is also on Table Mountain, but he is filming a Japanese presenter for a reality TV show.

Crute and I have been partners at Refresh Creative Media for 5 years. Crute is the classic action man. He runs, swims, mountain-bikes, climbs, surfs etc. Crute has done a cheese-roll on a wind-surfer and has been to jail wearing nothing but a sombrero. Lately Crute has become a camerman so that he can still justify getting himself getting into extreme locations.

Crute is hanging three quarters of the way down a 200m rope and his legs have fallen asleep. Jeremy Samson is sweating his way up Park Life at Paarl Rocks in 35 degree heat while Crute films. This is the scene where Jeremy investigates the possibility of moving Paarl Rock to the top of Table Mountain to build the peak. I have given up telling the story to everyone and hope the editing will help.

After 6 months work, Unfinished Business the movie is finally complete and sent off to the the Film Festivals. The 23min film includes an original sound-track by Hey Papa Legend (check their website we built for them), and a polished picture by Ashika Bracher. We very proud of it.

The MCSA (check their website we built for them), who has sponsored half our intern’s rent, complains that the saying used in the movie,“If Mohammed won’t come to the mountain, then move the mountain to Mohammed”, is offensive to Muslims. I pose the question to www.questionsonislam.com and get the following reply:

Dear Brother/Sister;

This expression shows the hatred and enmity that those who say these words have toward our Prophet. Those who turn their backs at his rightful cause are left in darkness. There is painful torment for them both in the world and in the Hereafter.
With our best wishes…
Questions on Islam Editor

I guess you can’t please everyone. To buy the DVD go to: unfinishedbusiness.coza/buy-now/

Google Apps ...]]> With the growing trend of business tools online (Software as a Service) I’d like to share some of the business productivity tools we use at Refresh Creative Media. Some of these are free online tools and others justify their costs by greatly increasing our productivity and communication.

Google Apps is an excellent tool for small businesses that need their business email, documents, calendars, etc. online. With a little configuration on your domain, you can get Google Apps for your business and send email using your domain with Gmail as the interface. You can also easily get rid of the irritating “Sent on behalf of” message by changing a couple of settings. Google Calendar is included as part of apps and works brilliantly for keeping track of your  colleagues movements, and company date specific info, for example employee sick days.

Other apps included are Docs, (useful for documents shared amongst a group) Groups, (Mailing lists and content sharing)  Sites, (Intranets and team websites) and Google Video for video sharing. Google Apps for your business is not free however, and costs $50 per user per year, and you also have access to the Google Apps Marketplace which provides products and services that integrate with Google Apps.

MediaWiki is software originally developed for use on Wikipedia by the Wikimedia foundation. At Refresh Creative Media we use MediaWiki to store and share software how-to’s, and design or development briefs, supplier information, and background information on our clients.

A possible alternative to MediaWiki is Google sites, but the ease of use and easy wiki editing features of MediaWiki has made it a favourite in our office.

MediaWiki is free and you can download a copy of MediaWiki at their official site. (It requires some basic PHP, MySQL skills for setup)

Socialcast is enterprise microblogging for your company, enabling real-time sharing of information via streams of regularly updated posts or documents from people within your network.

The basic free version provides more than enough functionality to increase your small businesses productivity and communication. The Premuim edition can be hosted on your server, while the Enterprise edition provide greater security and integration with your company systems. Socialcast also provides a host of applications from the Air app for your desktop,  mobile apps, and Gmail and Outlook  integration. View the Socialcast enterprise pricing structures here.

Wrike (besides being tricky on the tongue) boosts your teams productivity with intuitive online project management. Projects can be imported easily from an Excel template, and tasks can be presented in a timeline or list format. An intelligent e-mail engine fits in with your working process by allowing creation or editing of projects or tasks via email.

Managers can easily create task reports of team member activities, and automated e-mail notifications keep everyone in the team updated on their projects. Test drive the 30-day trial version of Wrike here.

Prezi is an innovative presentation tool that uses a single large format canvas, and allows you to zoom in and out of focus areas that you create. Paths can be created for your final presentation which auto zooms in and out of your content. It allows importing of flash animations, flash video, all image content, and even YouTube videos.

With Prezi you are able to create the presentations online or download an Air app which can be synced with your online presentations. The styling is fairly limited with Prezi with 9 set styles to choose from, but for $450 you can get a custom branded style for your company. There are 3 pricing plans available free, enjoy (R59/year), Pro ($159) which allow removal of the Prezi watermark, and marking your content as private as 2 of the features. Take a look at the online showcase of public Prezi apps to get you started.

These are a couple of the tools we use on a daily basis at Refresh Creative Media, to increase the productivity and communication within our team. Is your company using any other online tools that improve your company’s productivity? Please share with us below.

Questions on the use of any of these apps? Contact us at Refresh Creative Media.

QCFSJMHMQSMD

Further reading:
Gary Flakes’ Bio on TED
Download and read more on Pivot