Geek Chic

A cool ad campaign using stop-action video mixed with flash menus and pretty people:

via FormFiftyFive

Check this out:

It’s a strange interactive Ikea ad where music makes the actors/dancers move around (mostly backwards as far as I can tell).  It lets you choose from a couple of pre-selected tracks and use your keyboard for some midi-style canned drum samples.  The most fun thing I’ve found with it is to upload something from your music library and have them dance to it.  They seem to especially like TV on the Radio.

Kudos to whoever designed this.  I can’t imagine it was easy writing a Flash program where a video track responds to the amplitude of sound waves…

Thanks VSL

I just came across a couple of pages for The Arcade Fire that really impressed me.  Both are music videos (Black Mirror and Neon Bible from their Neon Bible album), but are completely interactive. And pretty amazing.

For Black Mirror, you can turn on and off the various song tracks as the music is playing, so you can hear what the song sounds like with, say, just piano and vocals.  I’ve seen stuff like this before, but the implementation is really good.

The second one is what blew me away, especially having been coding in Flash a lot more lately.  For Neon Bible, you get to control the lead singer’s various movements as he sings the song.  Granted it’s a limited set of movements, but I played through it twice and found a completely different set of actions from one time to the next.  So for those of us who really like easter eggs, this site can keep you entertained for a good amount of time.

What’s great about both is that they are on a timeline.  You have certain windows of opportunity to do something, and once they pass you’ve missed them.  So it becomes like a game (unlike most easter-eggy experiences, where the environment is static and you have all the time you want to click away).  A really great idea.

Remix Black Mirror

Play with the Neon Bible

Thanks VSL