SWEET SHOP’S SISTER CO. RUMPUS ROOM WINS SILVER AT THE ONE SHOW INTERACTIVE
The first released project from The Rumpus Room, sister operation to production company The Sweet Shop, has just landed a silver pencil in One Show interactive.
The music video shot for iconic Brit band The Pet Shop Boys enlists the use of interactivity with QR Codes subliminally embedded into the video to allow viewers to access online content via their mobile phones.
This accreditation validates the company’s reason for establishing. Set up in Feb 2007, the company has set out to look at the potential of new forms and formats that are emerging out of the networking of entertainment. Their aim is to merge film, interaction and community into one seamless experience.
Creative Director Tom Roope explains ‘the whole piece was a protest about the erosion of civil liberties, especially the introduction of ID cards in the UK. Our concept was to mirror and enhance the Pet Shop Boys use of bar codes in their live performance. We chose to use QR Codes, which are bar codes created to be read by camera phones, which contain links to websites. This allowed us to mix the indelible nature of film with the flexible qualities of the web. We subliminally integrated over one hundred of these links into the promo. As it was a web only release we knew that viewers would be able to navigate the film frame by frame. The embedded links were to existing web content that informed about current issues surrounding civil liberties, as well as specific content created by the likes of No2ID and Mark Thomas where people could get involved in specific campaigns. We made 2 versions of the video. The first is a low resolution black and white version based on the aesthetic of the qr code. This version was made for small screen environments. To create a more cinematic version we printed out the black and white video and then shot it stop frame in relevant locations.”
Paul Prince Managing Director of The Sweet Shop adds, ‘the project was a great first beginning for The Rumpus Room, the fusion of The Sweet Shop’s production values and film expertise with The Rumpus Rooms understanding of interactive digital content and distribution.
Forging new ground in this new landscape has been met with much interest, ‘Integral’ was viewed by hundreds of thousands, written about by 600 websites and blogs, featured in many national newspapers (including a 2 page spread in The Sun which has a distribution of around 8,000,000 readers daily), industry magazines including Shots, Marketing Week, NMA, Design Week, Desktop, Boards as well as industry websites including Creative Review, Creativity, The Guardian and Best Ads on TV to name a few. It also graced the front of the Quicktime website.
Project Director, Jacqui Kenny comments ‘Integral was a great opportunity to involve both The Pet Shop Boy’s community and civil liberty activists’. We directed viewers of the video to web content that allowed then to participate in protests and campaigns, as well as inviting them to be included in both the video and the back-end web content. We also gave them the tools to make their own Integral video’.
Creative Director Tom Roope (founder of Antirom and Tomato Interactive) and Project Director Jacqui Kenny are now venturing into the Southern Hemisphere to market The Rumpus Room and its potential alongside The Sweet Shop.
The Rumpus Room is also involved in the Make a Big Noise project in association with Oxfam International and have produced an installation for Yauatcha, the Michelin Star awarded Dim Sim house in Soho, London.
To view the project as well as explanation video go to: