FITC: Flashy Islands

23 Jul 2007 Category: Events & Exhibitions, Features, Internet, Technology, Worldwide

FITC: Flashy Islands

North Kingdom's feisty criminals for their "Get The Glass" online board game, as shown at the über flashy FITC festival, currently touring in Canada and the US.

FITC, the Flash in the Can Toronto Design & Technology Festival, started five years ago as an event focused on everything Flash, an app which you might be somewhat familiar with… Today, festival founder Shawn Pucknells’ brainchild has broadened into a lecture tour on ideas and technology that has been moving through Canada since this April and the States until it wraps up this autumn. So, when the 5th FITC began its annual rally in Toronto, PingMag went for a walk through - and bumped into North Kingdom. More below.

Written by Behrouz

North Kingdom’s making of the On Toyota’s Mind interactive website: an early sketch of a cute island crammed with all sorts of gear. From North Kingdom’s presentation at FITC Toronto.

Of course, there were many of the usual acclaimed design theorists, such as John Maeda, The Mill’s Angus Kneale, Joshua Davis, Colin Moock, Evan Roth, Craig Swann, and and and…

The making of North Kingdom’s On Toyota’s Mind website: the preliminary model for the interactive website. From North Kingdom’s presentation at FITC Toronto.

The On Toyota’s Mind website: the final version as interactive 3D island.

Sadly we don’t have space to talk about all of the projects at the festival, so we simply have to focus on two that we happened to bump into:

First, Mario Klingemann and his pet project The Blind Sketchmaker caught our eye. He developed this software to help him explore his fascination with computer generated imagery, as he said during the presentation. Mario searches for visually appealing images and wants to know why we find an image interesting, beautiful or aesthetically pleasing. And, as several programmers have tried before, he wants to find out whether computers can create art. He drew his inspiration partly from the constructed paintings by Russian artist team Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, which has been around on the net for a while: Komar and Melamid conducted lots of surveys to figure out what the most and least wanted paintings by people in fifteen different countries would actually look like.


Mario Klingemann’s “The Blind Sketchmaker” drew this…

… an app he has been trying to teach how to create art, with “beauty” translated into XML code.

North Kingdom’s making of the Get The Glass online board game: The crew starts building the model by hand.

Final touches are made before filming begins. North Kingdom’s making of for Get The Glass.

Mario explores a similar concept by trying to teach his computer to tell the difference between pleasant and unpleasant images. To do so, his The Blind Sketchmaker first needs to be introduced to a few so-called “artistic” examples. The Sketchmaker then translates properties of each image - such as colour, contrast, lines, symmetry, and so forth into an N dimensional vector. By doing so, the program is able to measure the distance between any two vectors, which means Sketchmaker can tell whether two images are similar or not. Using this method the software picks images produced by an image generating computer. “Beautiful” images are then translated into XML code. Just how would that look? Go to his Flickr presentation to find out.


North Kingdom’s “Get The Glass” island: a view of the street at night.

The footage of the model… By North Kingdom.

… was digitally traced… By North Kingdom.

… and 3D animation was added on top. By North Kingdom.

Next, while roaming through the exhibits, we dropped into North Kingdom’s impressive presentation, hosted by co-founders Robert Lindström and Steffan Lamm. Their exhibit was so nice, that we just HAVE to document two of their interactive projects, namely the making of their cute Toyota website and their lovely online board game for the Got Milk? campaign.


Pure CGI helicopters of for the Get The Glass online board game, by North Kingdom.

And some more cute little police cars for the Get The Glass online board game.

North Kingdom might need a bit of introduction: This is a four-year old company with about 20 employees based in Skelleftea, Sweden. These Swedish guys seem to be clever enough, so they are growing rapidly and regularly collaborate with long established advertising companies such as Dentsu, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, A.O.I., and W&K. When North Kingdom laid their hands on two Toyota campaigns, both of them became the most successful online ads for the automaker – at least in Sweden. For PingMag, they kindly showed a tiny bit of the making of their beautifully animated 3D island for On Toyota’s Mind. [See pics above.]

The Get The Glass characters were first shot on video and then animated digitally. See the finished models on top. By North Kingdom.

Recently, North Kingdom received a lot of attention for their online board game called Get The Glass - a part of the Got Milk? ad campaign that has been trying to make Americans drink more milk for quite a while. The concept stemmed from Goodby Silverstein & Partners: The game takes place on an island where the notorious Adachi family lives, a feisty criminal family with weak bones, bad hair and equally bad teeth due to lack of vitamin D. Online players help the Adachi family in their pursuit of a heavily guarded glass of milk behind the walls of Fort Fridge Castle.


Robert Lindström and Steffan Lamm of North Kingdom, obviously heavily concentrated at their FITC presentation.

Let’s follow North Kingdom as they start with a real-world model and move to a CG interface. First, they build a detailed model of the whole island. Characters and additional animation were later created digitally and added to the original footage. [Take a look at the pics] Thanks to the adorable Adachi family in 3D, the website was quite a success, with over one million visitors in the first six weeks. Nice, indeed.

That’s all? Yep, a quick but interesteing promenade through this year’s FITC. Check out the website for their roadshow this summer.

51 Comments

  1. I’ve always wondered how they do those very detailed illustrations! GREAT ARTICLE!

    Posted by: Gordon on July 23rd, 2007 at 11:43 pm

  2. their web site… is kind of sassy too much.

    But this is awesome.

    Posted by: claxus on July 24th, 2007 at 12:03 am

  3. I played this game very funny. And very good web page design

    Posted by: Morton on July 24th, 2007 at 1:51 am

  4. These avatars are nice in looking.

    Posted by: Helen on July 24th, 2007 at 3:54 am

  5. Such creativity!

    Posted by: Abundancelaw on July 24th, 2007 at 4:29 am

  6. Wow, I love that conceptual work!

    Posted by: Okinawa News on July 24th, 2007 at 3:35 pm

  7. Great inspirational article! Thanks!
    Best wishes,
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    http://www.voxdesign.pl

    Posted by: Anna Krenz on July 24th, 2007 at 7:15 pm

  8. I can’t get over the amount of detail that went into the “get the glass” online boardgame!

    Posted by: doane on July 31st, 2007 at 3:17 am

  9. Thanks for showing us the process

    Posted by: Okinawa Travel on November 24th, 2007 at 6:12 am

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