Almost 2 weeks ago, the enormo.us crew was lucky enough to attend SXSW (South by Southwest) aka the most out of control geek fest/party/conference of the year. The Syracuse University iSchool was gracious enough to send us to the conference in Austin, Texas after we placed in the top four of a contest being run on the iSchool blog. (Our blog post entry – http://bit.ly/fjlbYk, The contest rules -http://bit.ly/hOX9MD)

Of course, in that blog post we promised to bring back some video documentation of our trip. We had big plans for a documentary style story to show what SXSW was all about, yet upon arriving we realized we were on to something different.

A Classy Documentary about SXSW from Enormo.us on Vimeo.

Going into SXSW we had no idea what to expect from this conference. The above video was simply our reaction to what we experienced. SXSW is a whirlwind of different things and we tried to convey our experience through this video.

Standout moments from the conference for me personally are the moments that you don’t find in the SXSW program. Things like randomly eating lunch with experienced people in our industry, launching graFighters at the Klout House party, working all night to get grafighters working for the launch party, giving away boatloads of free t-shirts, having strangers recognize your free t-shirts and associate them with your brand, and even touring a local animation studio Powerhouse Animation (http://www.powerhouseanimation.com/work.php)

These things alone make SXSW a one of a kind experience that is not to be missed. The main talk that stood out in my mind was by 4chan founder Moot. He spoke on the value of building community and how important it is to a site or product. Also some noteworthy panels were given on Native vs Web Development for mobile devices, as well as a panel on the success of Angry Birds, delivered by one of the creators. Bottom line, If you ever have the chance to go, you should go.

On the other hand the conference is not without its downsides. As has been repeated many times before in blog posts about SXSW, it seems 2011 was about marketing and advertising, not building products. This left the people that make things (designers, developers, product people) feeling somewhat underwhelmed . It seemed everywhere you turned there were PR, Social Media, and hordes of Marketers. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it speaks to the fast pace and commercial success of the industry. However, it is tough to please everyone and there were many developers with whom I spoke that expressed were looking for a more “intimate” setting. Gaming conference E3 had a similar realization a few years ago when it realized the spectacle of E3 was outshining the games. You know you have priorities wrong when you are planning next years E3 booth a year in advance rather than working on your new game. E3 did try to downsize for a few years, but has since returned to its glamorous ways. In the same vein, SXSW should learn from E3 and be cautious and practical in its growth.

See you next year SXSW!

Matta – Release The Freq from Kim Holm on Vimeo.

Over the past few weeks we have been working with the team at Brand-Yourself.com to produce a short video that can effectively explain exactly what their product does.

The video was created almost entirely in Adobe After Effects with graphics being created in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. The music was created by Brand-Yourself CEO Pete Kistler.

Below are some screenshots of the storyboarding process and idea generating we did before we made the video. You can see how the ideas are directly represented in the final video.

A weekend project by Eric Cleckner.

Wind-Up birds series by NYC artist Marcelo Gallegos.

This past weekend we took our office painting skills to the Syracuse iSchool to paint an art installation in their classroom called “The Innovation Studio”. The painting was only step one of an overall Innovation Studio redesign that will take place throughout the entire semester.

Here is the pre-render we made before doing any painting

We shot a timelapse over the 3 and 1/2 days while we were painting.

When designing the blocks we used the ceiling grid to correctly line everything up on the walls. This made it much easier to stay on track as we went around the room. Each block was the exact size of a celling tile as well to keep everything consistent. We used a tripod mounted laser level that had both vertical and horizontal levels. We also used rolls and rolls of Frog Tape (better than regular painters tape for painting straight lines) since each square had to be taped off two or three times depending on how many adjacent blocks there were. Much of the 3 1/2 days were spent figuring out the most effective way to paint border-less blocks and we can tell you there isn’t a great solution if your using tape. We often had to recite rules we made up to our-selfs in order to remember which way the tape should move. It was easy to get LOST IN THE GRID (Tron voice).

Stay tuned for updates throughout the semester on the Innovation Studio.