Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year from the Sliced Bread team. Download your own PDF of the marker here, then try out the augmented reality Christmas message for yourself using the instructions below!

1. Make sure your webcam is connected and ready for use and go to www.thebestthingsince.com/crimbo_ar

2. Make sure your webcam is allowed access to Flash content by right-clicking on the Flash window and selecting the webcam icon tab in the settings, and selecting your webcam from the drop-down list.

3. When asked, using the front-side of this card, point the Christmas tree symbol at your webcam and your Sliced Bread Augmented Reality Christmas animation will appear!

Note: You may also need right-click and go to Flash Global Settings then authorise this domain.

Another one fresh from the toaster – a new showcase sequence relating to our client and in-house projects on character animation. The piece highlights the capacity in which we work with agencies and direct brands.

Fresh from the toaster – we have just put together two, one and a half minute showcase sequences relating to our client projects on online games and brand communications. The pieces highlight the capacity in which we work with agencies and direct brands. We have some more sequences coming up in the future – so watch this space.

Coca Cola announce the launch of their new ‘Neverending Dance of Happiness’ games for Facebook and Android devices. The games coincide with Coke’s experiential festival campaign  across European countries in 2011.

They encourage players to connect and win prizes via Facebook. The more you score against the 120 dance move options, the higher you rank. The Facebook game uses 3D character renders and is fully customizable across 6 genres with male/ female clothing options for that unique avatar style.

Coca-Cola is spreading some summer happiness with a new game on Facebook. The ‘Neverending dance of happiness’ will get you interacting with friends as you test your dance moves in rock, disco, salsa, electro, hip-hop and metal. By earning points during the game, you can save up for cool summer prizes – from Coca-Cola headphones to festival tickets.

You can also share your summer memories through videos and images you upload to the Facebook fan page. Why not get your summer groove on too with Coke and Facebook and spread a little happiness?

To refresh the festival season in the Benelux, Coca-Cola has launched the ‘Make Your Move’ campaign, spreading summery vibes on- and offline from June to September.

The beverage brand is present at festivals like Pinkpop, and can be found on the beach, where a Coca-Cola beach hut not only offers refreshing drinks, but also fine tunes to dance on. And those moves can be shared live via the ‘FaceLook’ face-recognition app.

Coca Cola also spreads some summer happiness through another app called ‘The Never-ending dance of happiness’, with which you can test your dance moves on several music-genres. Unlock new moves by ‘bump’ technology when bumping with other app users. This game lets you earn points and save up for musical summer prizes like festival tickets.

Sliced Bread are very proud to be partnering with The Green Marine (TGM) team on their new venture. The project is a proposed animation series for digital broadcast. We worked with the TGM team on character development/ design and an animatic trailer. We were drawn into the project by its original concept idea and existing interest by leading industry figures. Visit the site to get a full understanding of the properties fantastic potential.

David Pye is an award winning Transport Planner, campaign Director and CSR specialist. Continually striving for success he is recognised for his creativity, innovation and CSR project impact.

Committed to providing solutions to some of the most challenging economic, ethical, social, health, transportation and environmental issues individuals and organisations face – he is a man on a mission. That’s what motivates him. Combining passion with business aptitude he is an effective influencer at all levels. Advising organisations how to become more sustainable, socially and environmentally responsible, applying common sense and without any flannel!

At a time when there is genuine concern about the future of children in our society, he believes that we should be demonstrating the positive role that media can play: the impact it can have on culture, social values and learning as well as providing relaxation and entertainment.

He has developed a new children’s sci fi action adventure animation series…A BROTHER AND SISTER, AFRO CARIBBEAN JUDO MASTER, A FROG FROM OUTER SPACE AND A HANDFULL OF ECO VILLIANS. The series follows The Green Marine and the team as they act locally and battle globally to protect Planet Earth not only from its inhabitants but also from a succession of evil alien eco-villains.

New technologies and new patterns of use provide us with opportunities to re-invent our relationship and connections with our kids. Using a clearly defined set of environmental, health and social values The Green Marine animation series and accompanying applications will entertain, empower and help keep children on track. As The Green Marine says ‘The time is always right to do what is right.’ Nothing is impossible!

They are currently looking for commercial investment to bring the property forward and fulfil its objectives. If you are interested please contact David Pye direct via the TGM website, LinkedIn or Twitter.

After last years triumphant effort we agreed to offer another helping hand to this years global event – Twestival Local. Given that ‘local’ has connotations of collaboration, we decided that 30-second stop-frame animation sting would be the perfect medium. Stop-frame is my first passion, as some of you will know, as I spent the first 5 years of my professional career animating on children’s series for TV.

Working with Amanda, Crystal and Leynete is always such a joy, this year we had the added spin of having to find someone who could make us an original origami ‘Twestival’ bird and Sam Tsang kindly stepped in to help us, (his website is here). First of all he went off and fine tuned the type of bird we were looking for and then he helped us understand the process on how it is made.

Because of our client commitments at Sliced Bread, it was very hard for us to give as much time as stop-frame needs. We provided the equipment/ materials and enlisted the help of some current students and graduates, to get the production done. Georgie, Charlie, Hannah and David all kindly gave up a week of their time to come to our studio and animate. Georgie and Charlie have provided an insight into the experience below. Special thanks to those who gave a ‘hand(s)’ during the weekend shoot too – Adam (@wrongcrowd), Jo (@joellybaby), Carmen, Natalie and Christina.

This year Twestival is going ‘Local’ in cities around the world on Thursday 24 March 2011. Events for Twestival Local will raise funds and awareness for local nonprofits that organizers identify for having an incredible impact within their own community.

The events can be as big or small as the city wants to make it. We have had Twestivals in a local pub, a bowling alley, a trapeze studio, and even a giant yacht, all thanks to the generosity of local donors and sponsors who come forward to support the volunteer efforts. It is about using your time, talent and resources to come together on one night to make a difference. Think global, act local.

Georgie Cobbs

Working on this Twestival project for Sliced Bread throughout the past 7 days has been exhausting yet definitely exciting. The prospect of a creating a stop-frame animation from start to finish in just a week definitely had its problems but putting together all of our resources and creative minds (and some sweets) everything got resolved calmly. It was incredibly inspiring to be spending the week in a place, bursting with creativity, like Shoreditch is. Animating paper and origami birds definitely had its hurdles and restrictions due to how fragile they are but we found a way to simply rig them and animate their movements convincingly.

Big thanks to Jamie Denham for giving four students/graduates the opportunity to be involved in such a wide-spread project and giving us the freedom to be creatively responsible and also to all the participants who were kind enough to give up their Saturday afternoon to volunteer their hands for the project.

Charlie

Oh my goodness! Where do I start?! I’d sum up the total experience as something like concept to animation in 6 days,fighting with blue tack, making and fixing mistakes we didn’t have time to make, pecking at grapes and MAMOM sweets while waiting for camera batteries to charge. For myself, the beginning started with high levels of excitement to be involved in a live project within the creative industry. The icing on the cake was that I’d be spending a week in the amazingly creative Shoreditch area. Nerves were normal as usual, as I was curious about how animating with 3 other individuals was going to turn out! It ended with a well deserved 30minute break on Sliced Breads amazing roof garden terrace, laughing joyously & hysterically (probably a result of sleep deprivation) at ourselves & the whole entire week with the amazing David Steed & Georgie Wright (Hannah you were there in spirit).

Awesome shout out to Sliced Bread’s head honcho, Jamie Denham, for giving students/ recent graduates the opportunity to get involved!

We are proud to be supporting @twestival again this year with some more animated content to help them promote the event, this years theme is ‘local’. Its great to back with team (Amanda Rose, Crystal English and Leynete Cariapa) and this years creative will have a stop-frame feel, which is all very exciting! The event is on the 24th March 2011 – maybe we’ll see you there?

In the meantime, here’s a short piece about Twestival’s local impact using Miriam’s Kitchen as case study (created by ShineOn Storytelling), its definitely worth a view if you want to know more about the event and the help it provides for some extremely worthy causes.

We are currently in development of our first iPad app which will be an interactive storybook (more on that later) but since the iPad’s launch there has been quite a lot of discussion about HTML5 and creating web based application as ‘non-flash’, this has caused quite a stir amongst the animation community. We all have our grumbles about Flash, Sliced Bread has only just upgraded to CS5 from CS3, because from what we could gather, going to CS4 was way too much of a risk in animation production. 85% of our output is web based, which is why we are particularly interested in this issue. We have also started working on a number of client projects where the end product needs to work on a ‘mobile’ device, so not only the Apple favourites (iPad/ iPhone) but also Android, Windows Mobile, RIM products etc, etc. There is definitely a need now, more than ever, for some kind of web standard (without the need for plugins). A lot of HTML5 debate seems to be how will the video/ dynamic web elements ‘play’, rather than how it can be created, whilst at the same time keeping the filesize efficient and of good quality (unlike animated gifs).

From what I understand from some our digital agency clients and because its only the start, these type of productions are quite hard to budget, particular on fixed based budgets as you just don’t know what you are going to come up against. Currently the developer will do most of the ‘animating’ through creative direction, or a prototype is built (in Flash) which is then ‘converted by code’, creating almost double the work. Also, with regards to apps, sometimes there is need for several iterations before they are approved.  However, I do understand that Apple have now (recently) relaxed some of ‘their rules’, mainly relating to ‘objective C’ conversions.

The thing is, Flash is such an easy programme to pick up and get animating and that’s all an animator really wants to do. Quite often we have spent weeks coming up with the idea, storyboarding it, creating vector elements (say in Illustrator), etc, etc. From Flash or wherever, we don’t really care about the output as long as it works on what we need it to. Even against H.264 compression, Flash (SWF) files can be tiny in filesize and this has added advantage for gaming, particularly since they quite often require lots of assets for ‘non-linear’ use (see 1066 The Game for reference).

Whenever we do a work placement and where that student is still at school, we tend to offer them Flash as the right tool to get them started. Its not only an easy way to teach the basic principles of keyframe animation but all the tools are there to aid the animator and get the job done. When I was 18, I did a media course and at the college they had an Amiga with Deluxe Paint 3, this was a big step in the  right direction of me becoming an animator, as I could very easily get my idea up and running. I do remember exporting to video being a nightmare as you needed some kind of card and another unit to be able export (just to VHS!). Being able to afford to be able to have one at home, also had its advantages. Given that Flash is also part of the Abobe suite it also has the added benefit of integrating neatly with other products like Photoshop, After Effects etc.

I think the biggest concern is, if it needs to be non-Flash what other tools are out there to get the job done? At the moment not a lot, Adobe has a new application coming out called Edge, here’s a link to a prototype presentation. There is also Sencha, which I have recently download at had a little play with, it is only a beta version, and seems very light not nearly early enough the intuitive tools like Flash has, and certainly not something we can use professionally. However, I do think in both these cases its a move in the right direction to achieving a ‘web standard’ for this type of content.

Sencha Animator allows you simply place objects (text, shapes, and images) onto a re-sizable stage area, configure their properties and then animate to bring them to life. You can move, scale, skew and rotate objects singly or at various levels of nesting, in 2D or 3D space. With Sencha Animator, you can also take advantage of CSS3 capabilities like gradients, blurs, reflections and shadows. You can create basic animations quickly and easily. But Animator is also designed to be a CSS3 power-tool. So when you need to add HTML or custom CSS, it’s easy to do that too. Best of all, Sencha Animator outputs pure CSS3 animation code, so it’s hardware accelerated on Apple iOS, which creates incredibly smooth animations. This also means it’s ready to work with any JavaScript library, not just Sencha.

Trafalgar Origins – Channel 4 from Preloaded on Vimeo.

Here’s an animation we have just completed for Twestival Global (2010)... see twestival.com for more details. There’s a blog post coming up shortly, which details more about the collaboration process (which was a fantastic experience), but for now we wanted to get it out there and promote the cause.

Creative: Crystal English, Leynete Cariapa, Animation: Sliced Bread, Music: EliasArts, Audio: Green-Shoot, Recorded at Dammit Ltd., Voice: Lawrence Sheldon, Twestival Bird: 383 Project, Video Footage: charity: water, Thanks to What Talent Ltd., Produced by Connect the Dots Foundation, Photography Courtesy of National Geographic (c) James P. Blair/ National Geographic, Gabriele Gaspardis, Justin Sangani, Brooks Walker/ National Geographic, Johannes Ehrhardt, James P. Blair/ National Geographic images

What is Twestival™?

On Thursday 25 March 2010, people in hundreds of cities around the world will come together offline to rally around the important cause of Education by hosting local events to have fun and create awareness.  Twestival™ (or Twitter Festival) uses social media for social good.  All of the local events are organized 100% by volunteers and 100% of all ticket sales and donations go direct to projects.  If you would like to get involved, please Register your City, Register your School, or Volunteer and we will get in touch.  Organizers will be given a handbook and invitation to our collaboration workspace.  Follow @twestival for updates.