Videos: Superfad

How do you make a smartphone ad stand out from the competition? In the case of Samsung 'Meet The Note' it's by stripping away everything except the essentials - the phone and the hands interacting with it. This was the premise behind the spot developed by agency 72andSunny and directed by Justin Leibow. Shot against a luxurious black background with colorful lens flares highlighting the minimal type, the spot creates a calm and peaceful mood with plenty of room to breathe. In camera, Leibow captured a series of moments of interaction with the new Samsung Galaxy Note, all spotlighting the use of the S-pen, a proprietary technology enabling notes, collaboration, and creation on the fly. Set to a mysterious and engaging soundtrack, 'Meet The Note' captures the essence of the phone at its purest, and grabs your attention in an almost subliminal way. Advertising as meditation? We can dig it.

We enter the octagon for THQ's new 'UFC Undisputed 3' spot. Combining motion-capture and 3D models of real fighters, we recreated an actual UFC fight to deliver an intense and visceral vision of the game.

Description Still Life is an interactive gallery piece that takes traditional still life painting into the fourth dimension with a motion-sensitive frame on a rotating mount. Technology On the hardware side is a custom-framed television connected to a rotating mount from Ergomart. Attached to the back of the television is a spatial sensor from Phidgets, makers of fine USB sensors. On the software side is a simple C application to communicate with the sensor and feed the data to a Unity 3D scene. The scene itself consists of a camera tied to the sensor data with all lights and objects parented to it so they rotate in unison.

Description Created by Scott Garner and Loren Judah of S perfad Seattle, this second entry in the Mission Control series takes things even further with streaming video in a physical 3D space. View the live version here: Mission Control II: Video Display System Concept After completing the first Mission Control, we were highly motivated to push the boundaries of web technologies even further, this time creating a 3D environment for browsing the catalog of S perfad's work in a more immersive way than a traditional web portfolio. We especially wanted to experiment with removing the normal layer of flat UI elements in favor of a more pure and tactile set of interactions. Technology The backend of MC II is driven by a custom PHP script that pulls data from the S perfad website in JSON and then processes each project. The script grabs additional video data from the Vimeo Developer API and generates the dynamic background textures with a combination of GD and ImageMagick calls. Theora versions of each video are created as needed with ffmpeg2theora. Key front-end technologies include HTML5 video, CSS3 effects and, most notably, WebGL, which allows for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics directly within a web browser.

Direct mail is all well and good, but we wanted to explore the possibility of adding another dimension to traditional 2D print design. Tecnology For the demo, we optimized a 3D model of a Toyota Camry in Autodesk Maya before exporting it to Unity 3D for lighting, texturing and positioning. Using the String Augmented Reality library, we were then able to take this 3D scene to Apple Xcode for deployment on an iPad 2.

What do you do when you've got such a colossal character that a simple web banner cannot possible hold him? You break out of the banner and take over the page, of course, which is exactly what we did with this Flash takeover for Kirby's Return to Dreamland. Leveraging assets from the television spot we also created, we optimized and animated this Flash movie to make a major impression in a minimal file size.