Last month The Barbarians went on a photo expedition to GE’s original headquarters in Schenectady, New York. We spent time digging through the GE archives at The Schenectady museum, exploring the massive turbine factory at GE Energy and experiencing the cutting edge technologies being developed at The Global Research Center. The trip felt like a sci-fi movie—past and future innovations mixing together in an epic tour of industry.

The result General Electric’s newest venture into social media: an Instagram feed and accompanying it, a brand-new Tumblr. It’s a mix of archival and present day photos, capturing the research and technology GE has developed over the last 130 years, processed in Instagram. Currently we’ve published photos around Solar Technology and Fuel Cell research—awesome Selenium chambers, photovoltaic cells and solar simulators.

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The New York City DOT came to us with a startling statistic: When a pedestrian is struck at 30mph by a vehicle, there is an 80% chance they will survive. If a pedestrian is struck at 40mph, there is a 70% chance they will die. 10mph, a seemingly subtle difference while you are behind the wheel, is the difference between life and death as a pedestrian.

As part of the DOT’s ‘that’s why it’s 30’ campaign, the barbarians took it to the streets.Using the DOT’s wanco matrix sign, a speed radar, and 48×27 dot matrix (think microsoft paint), we created a speed board to remind New Yorkers to slow down. The speed board displays a graphic of the familiar pedestrian walking man, with the posted speed limit of 30mph.

The on board radar detects passing cars speed, and if a car breaks the limit, the pedestrian changes to a skeleton, with SLOW DOWN in giant letters.

Henry Lai came up with the skeleton graphic. This was an exercise in classic video game illustration, adhering to just a simple dot-matrix with lit or non-lit pixels. Originally we had created looping animations for each state of the pedestrian, a walking man, and a walking skeleton.

This not only violated the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices by using rapid flashing and animation… But we also learned that we only had 2-6 seconds of display time, a 48×27 pixel grid, and 2KB of ram to play with.

In the end, the two frames were plenty. The boards are starting to roll out around the city, and we are hugely proud to have worked on something that can get drivers to slow down, and keep pedestrians safe.

What began as a journey to sxsw to build a solar powered carousel, has ended with Episode 5 of the GE Show: Solar.

In this episode we are looking at the future of solar technology, and the ways in which we can harness the energy of the sun. This comes on the heels of GE’s release of their new CdTe thin film panels. The panels represent new breakthroughs in affordability and scale. The idea is to put thousands of these solar panels into arrays to power things like factories and cities, not just your refrigerator. We used these panels to power our carousel at sxsw, and the idea that 100sq miles of these panels could power the national grid got us thinking about the power of the sun.

For our first module, Power of the Sun, we took the basic make-up of the sun: 71% Hydrogen, 21.7% Helium , and used that recipe by filling a weather balloon with that mixture of gas. We ignited it and captured the chemical reaction with 24 cameras shooting the explosion in a full circle, creating a 360 degree portrait of our miniature sun.

Our second module is about GE’s solar powered carousel, a 1926 antique carousel modernized with an electric motor, over 2000ft of GE’s tetra contour LED lights, and painted all white.

The carousel ran off of 76 Solar CDTE Panels at sxsw, which captured over 5KW to run the motor. This module makes use of the new HTML5 video object, it’s an interactive video where you can spin through a couple days of the carousel at sxsw. Check it out!

That’s not all, our final module is a curation of some awesome stuff people are doing around the world with solar. You can visit the rest of the show here

Episode 6: Visions of Health, is on its way

Aside from our overview post. I thought it would be cool to include some stills for how we made the Car films for YouTube Show & Tell We tried to accomplish everything in camera. We looked to references like: the trolley from mr.rodgers, train set dioramas, and car commercial cues that didn’t benefit from cg.

We needed to solve how the car would move. Radio control and magnets were tossed around, but we envisioned having many takes, and needed to control the set a bit better. We arrived at a slot track, driven by a HO gauge train sitting beneath the road:

We needed enough track to drive seamlessly through our environment in one take. We constructed a giant parallel track system, one for the car, and one for the camera:

The car itself was a die-cast dodge omni, with gradients for windows, and some rough wireframe printouts that we cut out and printed back onto the car:

Using an train throttle, and smooth dolly rig we were able to start constructing our sets around the train tracks. Here is a snap showing film 2, and the lush High Def environment.

Huge props go to devilfish, for constructing and art directing the miniature worlds we sent car through, it was no small feat in the time we had.

YouTube came to the Barbarians looking for ways to get more creatives thinking about YouTube as a platform for their campaigns.

Rollerskating babies, dancing eyebrows, LED sheep, people jumping into their own pants, GHOSTS…. when they hit they hit.
But what about that video with 567 hits that was supposed to be the next Sneezing Panda? What went wrong?

Show & Tell is dedicated to the best creative marketing examples on YouTube. It’s part of an ongoing partnership with the Art Directors Club, who have handpicked the best examples of: Brand Channels, Interactive Video, Homepage Ads, and Viral Hits.

In Tandem we’ve created a film kicking off each category. Each film is based on a ‘car’, that leaves traditional media in search of a better life on YouTube. We directed the films and created some pretty awesome miniature worlds to travel through. There’s a yeti involved.

This is really exciting, as the examples for each category will grow, and become a better creative resource for whats possible on YouTube.

I looked blearily from the screen to find intern Alex Kaminsky had changed over the weekend.

Presentation Format: 20 Images, 20 seconds each, exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds.

Mike and I spoke at Pecha Kucha Night in Boston on wednesday. Pecha Kucha Night is a gathering of designers, architects, photographers, and other creative types. The event is worldwide and usually features 8-14 presenters.

Mike took the stage after the 20 minute beer break. The din died and the room became church-like. Mike gave an awesome talk. He focused on the history of The Barbarian Group, our creative approach, the creative lead process, and gave some solid insights into the wide variety of work we featured. He crammed hours worth of Barbarian knowledge into a 3 minute blitz, all the while cool as a cucumber.

Heres a photo of mike talking (confident), and me listening:

Credit: Jason Stevens from common-content.com

For more info on Pecha Kucha go here

For more coverage of the boston event go here

Over the past few months we have been hard at work with one of our zanier ideas yet…a celebration of sorts, with our friends over at CNN.
And not just any celebration of course—this one is all about the news—and pretty much all the headlines that are fit to print… on a T-shirt.

We got really excited when CNN asked us to help them help people uncover the newly reorganized and video rich CNN.com. They came to us looking for a fun way to get the word out and we decided what better way to turn “I just saw it on CNN.com” into a phenomenon than on a T-shirt.

The premise is simple- we added a tiny little T-shirt icon next to the headlines on the front page. Click on the T-shirt and you are taken through a seamless shirt ordering experience where you can have your favorite headline turned into a shirt (gray, white or the currently most popular black) unique to you with a custom time-stamp—all for just $19.99 including shipping!

Some of our favorites so far have included: “Weird fish leave sea, spawn on beach,” “Prince drops copter in galpal’s yard”

Sound fun? Sound crazy? Don’t believe us? Check it out for yourself and help get the word out. There will be new shirts on cnn.com every day. Heck you might even find a headline you can’t live without too!