The event was designed to carry out a public consultation using play. So, no never-ending online forms, questionnaires with leading questions and ratty ladies in the street. Basically, get a load of people together, tell them to think about what the space around means to them, then go out and draw it in fun light shapes. Which… was really fun!

Here’s some of team PM Studio’s pics from tracinglight.co.uk,

Smokers

Watershed cinema

It was also a pretty jammy’ night, a great chance to chat with great Bristol artists, business people & photographers. Never mind heading to the golf course for business, Thought Den do it next to the bar, create some art and do research on new media practices too. Bloody brilliant.

Here’s some more things other groups made, and to find out more, contact Tine Bech

The festival, igFest (interesting games festival) was conceived by Simon Games and is weekend of free urban games. If ‘urban games’ sounds like a silly marketing buzz-word, it really means, legally borrowing car-parks to play snakes and ladders, being chased by zombies late at night, running around college green with water pistols and following moose in the forests trying to get a picture of them. All igfest games, that were great fun for all the public who stopped by!

The best part was, all these games were free thanks to sponsors by the National Lottery, Watershed, HP Labs and the sexy Pervasive Media studio.

Ourselves, Thought Den, were heavily involved with the Commercial managing, promoting, volunteering, marketing and copywriting with the Festival. This involved a lot of running around for business (not for pleasure) and doing our best to deliver some great results for a fledgling festival. Check it all out in the portfolio.

But most of all we were heavily involved with having fun and living up to the spirit of the weekend. Play is good!

igFest (Interesting Games Festival)

Taking place around the Harbourside in Bristol, igfest is the first festival in the south west to invite people to discover and re-discover the city through playing games in the streets.

There are tons of games over the weekend, too many for anyone to play them all, but we hope you’ll love them all so much you will want to try as many as you can.

Here’s a few you’ll enjoy that weekend…

Moose Hunt

Moose will be making his autumn migration from the deepest Forest of Dean to Bristol over the week before the festival. Your mission is to find him and photograph him. Text ‘moose’ to 60300 to receive a map of the moose’s current location. But be careful, the moose will be told your location and if he ‘shoots’ you before you ‘shoot’ him you are out of the game. Prizes for photographs in various categories including first sighting.

Holla Lu Lu

Fill the night with your sound. Find members of your team across the city by hollering your unique cry.

Koreanlazerball

Korean Lazer Ball is the newest sport of the 21st Century.

Teams of lazer gladiators battle it out, scoring goals by bouncing the lazer beam from hand-held mirrors onto a super high-tech spot on the wall.

I personally suggest the Comfort of Strangers, a street game which was created in the media sandbox 07.

All the games’ start times can be seen on their Schedule and the only cost for you is your time (and the bus into town obviusly), ‘cos everyone & anyone in Bristol can play! For free!

See you there at the igLounge by the Watershed.

IgFest is organised by The igLab (Interesting Games Lab).

Our section of the event aimed to encourage the users to participate in the debate by hosting an open brainstorm after a brief run down of the current relationship between Film and mobile platforms such as mobile phones. The results were a little bizarre, but we uncovered some pertinent issues all the same…

It’s been hard-core few months, as you might tell from the other blog posts and mediasandbox…a lot of fun, inspiring, challenging, and more than anything this project has opened hundreds of doors for everyone involved. A realisation dawned this week that we really are operating at the forefront of the pervasive media industry…things break, people don’t understand, it’s new NEW stuff!

Our stand looked beautiful, as did Tom’s face beaming out from the 42″ plasma screen. People milled around, took the Happy Packages GPS demo for a test drive, asked us what on earth we were talking about and nodded knowingly when we explained the difficulties working with pervasive convergence in multi-platform content distribution systems.

At around 3 or 4 it was time to deliver the 6 minute presentation and face the judging panel, who were:

Sam Ingleby – Digital Communications Programme Manager, Intellect UK
Dan Sutch – Researcher, Futurelab
Paul Appleby, Series Producer, BBC NHU

It was all over in a matter of seconds (360 I suppose) and as the beads of sweat poured down my face my mouth moved of its own accord, parrying everything the judges could throw out – It’s a niche product, a playful campaign machine, a response to the enthusiasm shown by modern consumers to engage with their brands…And as it turned out, the cold hearted commercial hard-sell was what done it for us! After a painful few hours wishing the other Media Sandbox participants the best of luck, the announcement was made.

Happy Packages lives on! After an awkward group hug (and some slick high-fives) up on stage the party was on full swing. It wasn’t long until we headed to Start The Bus for more, and while I didn’t manage to get the barmaid’s number (no appreciation for Pervasive Technology it seems) it was night to remember: Champagne, food, friendly back slaps and promises to take over the world. Watch this space.

The talk had varied speakers from Dr Tom ‘have you read this book’ Abba and Rik ‘new internet tv ideas’ Lander who both rocked out with their own projects. The lovely host Vicky ‘wonky’ Brophy chaired a great night and judging from the comments (some in French!), people loved it.

Thought Den were invited to chair a discussion on the Distribution of Video to Mobile and explore the current scene, but no one had hair nearly as good as Ben’s last night…

The Session

Started by covering work on Happy Packages and discussing Distribution to Mobile devices. This delved into the history of Film & Mobile technology, from the first personal cameras and camera phones all the way into Bluetooth, purchasing of 3G bandwidth, codecs, current internet virals (Cadburys Gorrilla, Sony Bravia Paint & Balls) and curved beautifully into where the two genres begin to meet.

A perfect example is The Royal Navy’s – Get the Message site which unions the two technologies and lets the user send personalised video content either through their email or to their mobile.

It’s clear Mobile technology is gearing itself up for accepting higher bandwidth film content, and so we whipped out the famous, Media against Time graph, which based on really er… scientific data, shows how Media is increasing over time… scientific, yup.

The Discussion

Every member of the audience had one of three cards to prompt them into thinking about,

• Scenarios – where someone’s using their mobile phone
• Content – to deliver to the mobile phone
• People – who’s going to be using the content

which when pieced together into scenarios, eg, In the cafe + Football videos + My Granny, they allowed us to explore some of the wider thoughts concerned with Mobile Distribution of Film in the following catagories.

• Types of content
• How & Why
• Issues
• Distribution Models & Revenue Streams

The Results

These were bluetoothed ou on the night to the audience along with some very kindly donated videos by Team Rubber called DudeCorp,

• Types of Content – Plumbing, Corrie, Recipies, Football films…

• How & Why – Grandson’s suggestion, Covert interest, Accidentally…

• Issues – Cost, Stuttering, Poor Eye sight, Screen size…

• Distribution Models & Revenue Streams – Free, Supscription, Pay per view, Sponsored content…

We’re chairing part of the interaction to uncover everyone’s thoughts this Thursday (27/03/08) at the Watershed 7PM. It promises to be an interesting night and we’ll be utilising some of our Bluetooth technologies so we’d love you to come. As always, there’ll be drinks in the bar afterwards!

For more details, see the Cineformation site.

Both Clare and Dick from the Watershed lay down some inspirational speeches, waxing lyrical about the fantastic creative and computing industries currently booming in the west country. Roll on world domination. View the rest of the pics here

During the final pitch session we were introduced to Gill from Plot and John from BDH who have also been commissioned to complete a Pervasive Media project. As it turns out both groups have chosen to explore Pervasive Media using the theme of ‘happiness’, so we look forward to the discussions we will have and to discovering the ways our projects will influence each other over the coming months.

What a great way to start the New Year!