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He’s Definitely a Hotspot

After a couple months of hard work, the PDX crew was proud to put the finishing touches on a beautiful, immersive, brand-focused site for Newcastle Brown Ale (big shouts to our friends at Vitrorobertson and TWC). As the site went live, we were reminded of something we had almost forgotten (but not quite): Our very own Patrick Marzullo (aka Tricky, Trickster, Scrap of Man) is featured quite prominently just below the Opening Acts hotspot on the Record Store page.

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You see, the hired talent just wasn’t up to our rigorous standards. We needed someone who could look at records and swig beer like a champion… and, well, Patrick rose to the occasion. Check out the entire Newcastle experience HERE. And check out the entire Patrick Marzullo experience HERE.

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LEGO! LEGO! LEGO!

Like any good children of the 80s, we love LEGOs. So when our friends at Pereira & O’Dell hollered at us with a couple LEGO projects (the LEGO Photo iPhone app and LEGO CL!CK site), we didn’t hesitate. Coming into the studio to work/play with LEGOs all day—physically and virtually—has been ridiculously inspiring.

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Now that the results of a few (okay, more than a few) late nights are alive and kicking on the Interweb, we’re predictably giddy about the positive response. LEGO Photo is the #5 Free App in the iTunes Store as of today. Good (and incredibly smart) people from Fast Company, Mashable, KRonikle (the Kidrobot blog!), app.itize.us and WIRED have all had nice things to say about the projects.

So. Download the app. Get inspired on the site. And… please upload your LEGO-fied photos to the Flickr group we just discovered. You can see some of the early results of the collection here:


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Please be careful. LEGOfying an already-LEGOfied image may disrupt the balance of the space-time continuum.

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And A Merry Mustache To All…

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Hello. (Part 9)

Part 9? Really? This is getting a little out of control. But, as long as there are talented people to profile (and as long as your ravenous appetite for clever quips and ridiculous links remains insatiable), the beat goes on.

dylan_smith

Dylan Smith. Interactive. @dylansm. PDX.
Our mothers taught us that if we didn’t have something nice to say about someone, we shouldn’t say anything at all. Dylan… well… uhmmm… Dylan is… uh… hmmm… Aw, c’mon, Dylan! You know it’s not true. We have lots of nice things to say about you. We just can’t really say them right now. Not while the HR folks are looking over our shoulders. Are we serious? Actually, yes. Very serious.

andy_smith

Andy Smith. Lots of Things. LA.
A California native, Andy is a vintage car aficionado who dreams of one day buying a classic muscle car and heading for a weekend in Vegas. You know, just like those one dudes. Andy enjoys cooking (while his wife fixes the leaky faucet!), movies and anything written by James Ellroy. But lately, he’s been tackling the works of Dr. Seuss with his kids, Ben and Josie.

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Leslie Roberts. Producer. SLC.
What does Leslie love? Plants. Flowers. Dancing during staff meetings. Adventures. Christmas presents. Fishing. Fresh air. Songs. Poems. Books. Paintings. Small animals. Large animals. Bright copper kettles. Warm woolen mittens. Brown paper packages all tied up with string. Who does Leslie love? You. F’reals. She loves you.

jon_minori

Jonathan Minori. Interactive. @minoflow. SLC.
One day, Jonathan Minori will direct a music video. Hopefully, it’s something like THIS and not something like THIS. Although, if it were something like THIS blended with something like THIS, my head would probably explode from sheer awesomeness. In the meantime, Jon lives on powder, owns BKnowlden in triathlons and designs pretty things for the internets.

dan-conner

Daniel Conner. SLC.
Mr. Conner won the Struck Fantasy Football Championship last year. He was a merciless trash-talker. He let no one forget his victory. This year, the gods of nerd football have evened the score and the DPC currently resides in the basement of the league. You know what they say about karma… Anyway, Dan’s not a complete lost cause. He likes to fish Henry’s Fork in Island Park, ID and he (supposedly) graduated from  Thunderbird (THE American Graduate School of International Management). I guess we’ll believe him… but that school sounds totally made up to me.

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Melissa Crespo. @this_melis. SLC. (Honorary Induction)
While the UofU soccer standout has returned to an institution of higher learning and no longer sits, meets and eats with us—she said something on her last day that we’ll probably never forget: “Good things come from following the rules, but nothing great.” Well said, Mojo. Well. Said. (Cue swelling strings… and here we go with the slow clap… Clap… Clap… Clap… And, BOOM, thunderous applause!)

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MLS CHAMPIONS!!!

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Sunday night our beloved RSL faced the evil Landon Donovan, David Beckham’s shark-jumping hair and the rest of the LA Galaxy. We watched. We prayed. Our hearts pounded as if we had swallowed a fistful of ephedra. After 120 minutes and seven rounds of penalty kicks, our boys triumphed. And, while they were the underdogs on paper, they were the best squad on the pitch that night. Beckerman controlled the flow of the match. Rimando was a typical beast in the pipes. And Robbie Findlay just kept attacking until a small crack appeared for the equalizer.

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So, with the Anschutz Trophy resting safely at the foot of the Rockies, now’s as good a time as any to show off a couple print ads we delivered earlier this year for XanGo (RSL’s jersey-front sponsor) and RSL. At the beginning of the season, these executions might have felt aggressive… Now, they just feel right.

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Big congrats (again) to all our friends at RSL! Let’s do it again next year!

(If you haven’t experienced the intensity of the PK shootout, do yourself a favor and WATCH IT HERE. There’s nothing better than watching Landon Donovan blast a PK over the crossbar…)

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What’s Interactive?

Today at noon, the folks behind Avatar released something they’re calling an Interactive Trailer. Intrigued by the the word “interactive,” I downloaded and installed the Adobe Air application. There’s no doubt that the movie looks amazing (and it should, James Cameron has spent practically the whole decade obsessing over every detail), but I’m a bit confused about what, exactly, makes this trailer “interactive.”

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I suppose we all have our own thoughts about what “interactive” means. Quite simply, I think it means that the user’s action should create a unique and variable experience—and I don’t believe that’s the result of the Avatar Interactive Trailer. Everyone has the same basic experience: Watch the trailer then click a thumbnail to watch additional video content. The user doesn’t actually interact with the video, just around it, above it or below it.

After fiddling with it for 20 minutes or so, I don’t get it. I don’t see how this application is any different from a standard movie website that offers a series of videos. So, I have questions: Why build this as an Adobe Air application? What does “interactive” mean these days? Does just clicking to watch additional content constitute an “interactive” user experience?

In this case, ”interactive” just seems like the wrong label—especially when it comes to video content. The bar has already been set high by truly interactive video pieces like Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible and Cold War Kids’ I’ve Seen Enough. And the Avatar Interactive Trailer certainly doesn’t live up to that standard.

Agree? Disagree? Let’s hear it.

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upto12

Hello. (Part 8)

Hey, everybody. You’ve missed these posts. I know you have. You won’t admit it, but your inability to articulate your feelings doesn’t diminish the emotion at all. You’re working on it with your therapist, right? Well, okay then, that’s good enough for me.

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Eric Honan. Interactive. @erichonan. PDX.
Eric makes art for free and then gives it away

. To people he doesn’t know. He just puts it in a box or an envelope and sends it off. He also has the best-groomed beard in Portland—which, given all the scraggly, unkempt half-beards up here, isn’t really that tough. But still, his beard is fantastic.

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Bobbie DaLuz. Account Services. SLC.
Bobbie didn’t want to tell us anything about herself. She only wanted to talk about other people. She’s the one who told us that Peder farts on airplanes, that Phil wears a beanie to tame his spiky hair, that Kyle hates dogs and that Susan’s nickname is “Mama Kat.” All of this talking, I suppose, also tells us a lot about Bobbie.

spencer

Spencer Taggart. Business. SLC.
From 9am to 6pm, Spencer is all business—lunch meetings, golf, hanging his MBA diploma in prominent places, monitoring the stock exchange, taking phone calls on his bluetooth headset, looking at spreadsheets. But when dude leaves the office, it’s all rock all the time. When you see him cranking the Bon Jovi or dropping a karaoke hammer on “More Than Words,” just know that he’ll respond to any of the following monikers: Dudacious, Bro, Curly Sue, Fro, Spence-a-mania, Magnum, Hot Tamale, Mr. America, Studly, Superdude, Tagman, Spence Dogg, Megatron, Sputnik, Froth, Manimal and Boomer.

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Matt Manes. Design. SLC.
Matt is a Taurus. He loves tomatoes and black-capped chickadees. And they love him back. Really, they do. We all do.

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Tami DeGracie. Business. @mebabydoll Father’s Lion hd Sister Act film

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. SLC.
As the master of finances, Tami is a mathematical genius. For example, she (now) knows that one (1) boy bunny + one (1) not-boy bunny = 72 baby bunnies. Other things you need to know about Tami: She listens to Christmas music in July. She’s addicted to Mtn. Dew. She forces her husband and three sons to watch beauty pageants but never realizes that they’re asleep during the costumes, talents and evening gowns but WIDE awake for the swimsuits.

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Even the Fail Whale Has a Silver Lining

During today’s Twitter outage, something completely obvious hit me upside the head: Twitter is legit. Given the TIME magazine cover story and the Ashton vs. CNN showdown to 1 million (not to mention Kyality’s recent jump

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onto the USS Tweetie), I should’ve seen this coming a long time ago. So why did it take a 2-hour outage to spark the lightbulb over my head? Because I finally realized that everyone freaking out about the failure is actually a good thing for Twitter.

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You see, the outage was a sign that we’ve crossed over from “What’s Twitter?” to “HOLY CRAP, TWITTER IS DOWN! HOW WILL I EVER GET THROUGH THE DAY?!!” It’s a step that shouldn’t be overlooked. People freak out when Google goes down, when the cable TV goes out during Gossip Girl and when the wireless router forces us to get up off the couch and restart it. We don’t freak out when MySpace goes dark for an hour or two. We don’t freak out when Rhapsody is out for a half a day. We don’t even freak out when the mailman doesn’t show up for a day or two.

The bottom line is this: Outages and crashes show us what people value. If people freak out when something you’ve built goes down for a couple hours… then you’re probably doing something right. (But you’d also better fix the problem. Right. Now.)

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download The Big Picture

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Hello. (Ginger Edition)

Why would we segregate the redheads of Struck/Axiom? 1) It seemed like the right thing to do; and 2) Read this. In all fairness, Mike Torretta (from Part 2) probably should’ve been part of this group, but his ‘roided-out picture deserved separation from the rest of this gingerness.

So, yeah. If you’re anything like Kyality, you’re scared to death right now. It’s okay. Take a deep breath. Keep reading. There’s a slight chance these Gingers might not be as terrifying as they seem.

tosh

Tosh Brown ????? ????? ????? . Design. SLC.
Tosh listens to better music—Prince, David Bowie, Serge Gainsbourg and The Cramps—than you. His inspirations—JD Salinger, Wim Crouwel, Josef Muller-Brockman and Michael C. Place—are more inspiring than yours. His toys are exclusive vinyl and yours are just plain plastic. His wife is prettier than your girlfriend and his daughter is more beautiful than all of your children combined. In every possible way, Tosh Brown is a better person than you are. Once you accept this truth, it will be possible find a faint flicker of hope in your perfectly adequate life.

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Mike Morris

. Motion. @xeebtsab. SLC.
Mike is the only redhead in his family. I mean, other than his biological father… the mailman! Zing! Just kidding! C’mon, people! We know Mike’s legitimate. In fact, he legitimately rocked a goatee while attending BYU, an institution that fears facial hair like Mike fears DNA testing… Double zing! But, seriously!

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Anson Schall. Interactive. @horribtastic. SLC.
Anson disregarded the warning that if he didn’t submit any information for his profile, I would just make it up and find embarrassing pictures on the internets. But I didn’t have to make up anything. This stuff is all 100% true. Anson grew up in a town called Tehachapi Rogue

buy The Legend of Coyote Rock

, where there are lots of windmills, really tasty apples and a prison. Sometimes, he likes to dress up like a gunslinger. Other times, he’s a hat model. But mostly, he just takes naps. Thanks, Google.

peder

Peder Singleton

?????? ????? ???? About Last Night… psp Butterfly Effect: Revelation trailer ???????? ? ???? ????? ???? . Design. SLC.
If a Viking and a Pirate had a baby, it would be a lot like Peder Olaf Singleton. Which is weird, because Peder’s mom looks a lot like this… and I’m pretty sure this is his dad. Anywaaaay, about Peder. He’s 100% dude. He’s not afraid to punch you in the glutes. He’s raising his daughters on a healthy diet of Slayer and Pantera’s Cowboys From Hell. And, well, he’s the guy who thinks you can’t hear (or smell) his farts on a non-stop flight from Orlando to Salt Lake City.

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Hello. (Part 5)

(Let’s pretend you just read something really funny right here.) L! O! L!

Now get to know some more Ackers.

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Scott Sorenson Still Waters movie download . Design. SLC.
Award-winning quilter, celebrity chef and noted Egyptologist, actor/author/art director Scott Sorenson is currently the host of two competing local talk shows. His one-man Evita swept the Greater Sanpete Area Theatre Awards last June, and his book “Writing Dummies-themed Books for Dummies” is rapidly climbing the Amazon sales charts. Despite his busy schedule as a K-Tel sessions singer, he recently took time off to marry his partner, Walter, in Boston… finally legitimizing their dog children, Casey and Santo.

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Pam Colbert ????? ????? 45 ???? ?????? ????? Hard to Kill release ????? ??????? . Producer. @pkc91. SLC.
Pam is from Illinois. She is married to a man named David. She has two children, Vivienne (10) and James (6). When she is not working, she drives her children wherever they wish to be taken. While Pam’s life seems very straightforward, we don’t buy it. We’ve seen Pam’s future as a candy model and that future is bright. So bright that we’ve hired an intern to follow her around and take notes for the inevitable E! Hollywood True Story.

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Pauline Ploquin ??????? ??????? ????? ??? ????

. SLC.
Pauline is French. And, while that pretty much sums things up, we don’t mind perpetuating a few good-natured stereotypes. You see, Pauline likes nice things—art, architecture, fashion, food. She loves to hike and ski, but only as long as there’s a hot tub, a glass of wine and a plate of cheese waiting at the end of the day. What makes Pauline the most fascinating woman you’ve ever met is that France has repeatedly threatened to revoke her Frenchness—on account of her automobile: a gold 1993 Mazda Protege.

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Ryan Snarr

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Inferno hd

. Producer. @Snarrlylunchbox. SLC.
RSnarr has a heart of gold, three kids and the voice of a man-angel. He runs like the wind. He draws like a master. He shoots hoops like a baller. He swings a racket like a rich housewife (that’s a good thing, right?). And, to complete the picture, he carries a lunchbox like a 3rd-grader.

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Danny McAlerney ?????? ???? ???? . Interactive. @QuailAndQuasar. PDX.
There are many things you should know about Danny. Sadly we only have time for two of them. Number one: Danny rebuilds mopeds and sometimes wishes he were part of Brooklyn, NY’s Moped Army (google that for all kinds of Hipster nonsense). Number two: Danny is/was/might still be a member of a Judas Priest tribute band.

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