The team have been slaving away on some hard-core web development these last few months, with animation and interaction design as a side relish. Some of you may have heard of Parashoot before, without really knowing what we were on about. Well ITV are using it now!

Here’s a nice little animation we made to explain what it’s for and how it can help. Using Lemmings and a Tortoise. Essential for any ‘How to…’ movie…Enjoy!

Things seem to take longer these frosty-morning-creaky-limbed days. Apologies for the delay in posting, but finally we have some lovely videos to shout about.

The first is very exciting – we were commissioned by the BBC to run a workshop at the Pervasive Media Studio back in October. The brief was to give the hottest new BBC design recruits a taste of pervasive thinking. What better company to run the event than the den thinkers. It was a fun day with talks from the likes of Tom Melamed of Calvium, Luke Jerram and a stand-up brainstorm session on the PM’s monstrous and curving white board. Nick Johnston (Hatboy to most and many) kindly videoed and edited the highlights, so please plug in for 3 minutes of Thought Den magic…And Dan’s hair looks much better this time, eh!?

Another somewhat delayed announcement follows – the igfest 09 highlights reel is in! Geoff Taylor has been hard at it in the edit suite, Simon Johson has been on the phone to his copyright lawyers and I’ve been keeping interested parties happy with taster emails packed with images. But the wait is over, moving picture technology has triumped, gorge at will. What an awesome event it is. Roll on 2010.

igfest 09 from Igfest on Vimeo.

Almost 1000 people have registered to take part in Duncan Speakman’s Subtlemob project – and we’re having great fun being his technical support team. The project has featured in The Guardian, Grazia and the Evening Standard to name but a few… Our server almost crashed last night as hundreds of people attempted to download the 50MB audio file for London, but fear not because Rackspace Cloud Files

Cloud Computing came to the rescue! We thought our original provision would be sufficient, but it wasn’t, so now the MP3s are hosted on a dedicated whatsit up in the cloud somewhere and are screaming down the thingamajiggers faster than mustard. This is what they say “Cloud Files from The Rackspace Cloud is an offering which allows users to store data on the Rackspace infrastructure, from 1 byte to 5 Gigbytes.”

Subtlemob site

The Twittersphere is slowly catching on, so all you tweeters make sure you use the hashtag #subtlemob and spread the word. We’ve still got London, Bristol and Liverpool coming up. Download the audio file, grab partner and get on board for a magic piece of crowd theatre.

And as Dan Course himself said after the pioneering Bristol subtlemob earlier this year “Suddenly the world seemed rosier, I was wrapped up in a bubble for 20 minutes, and, um, fell in love with a complete stranger…”

Step forward Mr Rhys Thomas, new Thought Den employee and pumpkin-carving PHP extraordinaire. He’s currently working a 3 month trial (baptism of fire?) with us down at the Paintworks. In only two weeks he’s already played for our adopted football team – Team Rubber – been out on the piss with Mobile Pie, worked late, gone home early, cycled Dan’s bike to Sainsbury’s and visited the Pervasive Media Studio at midnight.

Rhys Thomas - Thought denner

His first project build was Subtlemob – take a look, it’s all going down this week.

Now he’s working on amends to Parashoot, the film industry’s Base Camp – we’re about to make it even more kick-ass with a nifty mobile phone feature.

Exciting week or what! Thought Den have a new employee Rhys, a Halloween surprise for everyone later this week, but also we’re trialling a new Bluetooth box with the Old Vic!

This project is in conjunction with the Bristol’s Old Vic and is aimed at enhancing peoples’ theatre experience, post-show.

thoughtden-bluetooth-box

Specifically we will be using it on Luci-Gorrell-Barnes piece, The Tragic and disturbing Tale of Little Lupin to pass out a phone wolf ring-tone to the attendees.

However, there’s even more exciting future potential for a few more ideas based with the theatre, especially since our RNCM piece.

Also, there’s the potential if you feel your event could do with a more pervasive edge to it.

Thought Den are very proud to have launched the new subtlemob 09 site. For those who don’t know what a subtlemob is yet (which could be most of us!), here’s what Duncan Speakman (the producer) has to say about them.

‘as if it were the last time’ invites you to take part in a secret event this November. You’ve seen the people freeze in train stations and the mass pillow fights, well this will be a more subtle experience.’

Thought Den were involved with the (more…)

Team Rubber recently came to Thought Den with a little pet project that is now fluttering its newborn wings up there in the intersky. The proposition mr Quigley is putting to the world? Let’s all get better at arguing, and let’s jolly well do it properly. After a week or two nailing down the correct terminology (proposition, position, supporting evidence anybody?) we entered the build phase, producing two sexy widgets for creating and viewing arguents while the team at Rubber and mr Nigel at Redefine nailed the HTML front end and Mr Ollie at Play Nicely laid down the logos, colours and brand guidelines – many thanks all!

Finally she’s flying, and a tasty little widget she is too – argue about whatever you want, between friends, and follow the resulting threads. Also, you can make your widget different colours! Here’s one to start you off. Comments (or should I say arguments?) appreciated…

It’s been a long time coming, but it’s finally arrived. Take a look at Bournemouth’s new Virtual Tour. We’re really really proud of this one because it combines the best of Thought Den in one sexy package – we had to create an engaging, well organised, comprehensive & beautiful looking guide to the Uni, so we pulled out all the stops. 3D animations, After FX, image galleries, videos, lovely colours, lovely menus. Let us know what you think, and don’t hesitate to get in touch if you like what you see

Read more about it in our portfolio. This is the latest in a long line of products we’ve produced for Bournemouth Uni and the fruitful relationship continues – we’ll be releasing another one early next year for the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice.