January 27, 2012

by admin

Bear 71 Premieres at 2012 Sundance Film Festival

Jam3 in collaboration with the National Film Board have just completed the interactive documentary, Bear 71. The multi-user experience launched alongside an installation at the Sundance festival entitled “Bear 71 Live”. The narrative follows the life of a female grizzly bear in Canada’s Banff National Park from the moment she is tagged and collared by park rangers to the moment of her untimely death. Created by Jeremy Mendes and Leanna Allison, the story is narrated by Mia Kirshner from the bear’s perspective, but users witness it through real footage collected from surveillance cameras that encompass the park.

Bear 71 blurs the line between the wild world and the wired one. Audiences explore the bear’s natural habitat, which is expressed as an abstract landscape constructed by thousands of stylized data points. A 3D particle engine was custom-built by Jam3 to bring this nature grid to life. As users tour the grid, they can peek into the multiple surveillance cameras placed around the preserve.

The bear’s story speaks to how we co-exist with wildlife in the age of networks, geo-location and shared digital information.

While exploring the chapters of the film, users are even turned into animals. If a users accepts, the film will use your webcam to observe you and broadcast still shots of you to other viewers by posting them to a “surveillance wall.” This multi-user server also generates users as clickable moving points on the grid so you can chart your own path and track those of other users.

Bear 71 highlights how our increasingly heavy dependence on technology separates us from nature even though it allows us to keep closer tabs on it. It also forces us to confront how we view ourselves in relation to technology and nature, and makes us question the validity of surveillance both in the wild and in human society.

Since it’s launch this past weekend the site has been attracting up to 30,000 visits a day without any paid media directed at it.

Watch the interactive documentary Bear 71.

CREDITS:
Produced by Loc Dao, Dana Dansereau, Bonnie Thompson and Rob McLaughlin at the National Film Board of Canada.

Creators: Jeremy Mendes & Leanna Allison

Interactive Agency: Jam3
Interactive Creative Director: Pablo Vio
Interactive Technical Director: Mark McQuillan
Interactive Producer: Media Ridha
Interactive Art Director: Cole Sullivan
Interactive Developers: Mikko Haapoja, Sunil John, Matt Fisher, Tom Dysinski
Designer: Aubyn Freybe-Smith

Writer: JB Mackinnon
Installation and Live Event: NFB, Lance Weiler, Mikko Haapoja
Voice Actor: Mia Kirshner

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November 14, 2011

by adrian

Bringin’ sexy back
to the Process section


Bored with the commonplace/typical “Process” or “How We Work” sections found in most studio or agency websites, our creative intent was twofold: To defy convention and to demonstrate our process in a way that is creative, amusing and downright unique.

Jam3 is known for work that is elaborate and visual, so collaborating with the very talented Dean West to transform our process into a series of over the top, epic photos was natural. Each person depicted in the Process collection is employed at Jam3. This is an important representation, as our people are the most integral part of the wonderful work that we produce.

Our Process collection aims to attract the people who understand the concept; who get our creative style and who want to be a part of the worlds we create.

Last Thursday, we invited a couple hundred of our clients and industry friends to launch the collection of photos and consume some alcohol at a sweet event space on King West. (Photos and video of party to come soon)

Check out the whole series in higher resolution here.
(Be sure to click on the photos to zoom in and see them in full detail).

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November 8, 2011

by adrian

Gold 2 years in a Row at the ADCC Awards


I think Johann van der Smut, better known as ‘Goldmember‘ put it best when he said,
“I love Goooollld”.

On Thursday night at the 2011 ADCC the Lexus IS series site we produced for Dentsu Toronto took home a gold trophy. This is the 2nd year in a row that we took gold home as we won for another automotive site with the Buick: Behind the Beauty piece last year.

Now, golden awards generally do not mean that much for clients as they’re typically interested in results and seeing stats that are moving in the upward direction. However, agencies on the other hand… they sure loves them some gold trophies and since we’re hired by and large by the agency world winning gold certifies that we’ve done exactly what they’ve hired us to do — produce a flawlessly executed piece of work. Internally at Jam3, a shiny gold statue helps us rationalize why we probably worked on the weekend or spent that 10 extra hours redoing a rollover until it felt just right. You can say it’s the perfectionist’s ultimate reward for being so overly anal.

I’m especially thrilled that the Lexus site won because it really is one of our favourite sites that we’ve designed and produced. It was the exact type of collaboration between agency and interactive production that we love. Too often in Canada due to budgetary constraints are we saddled with cutting up a 30s spot or using b-roll footage to cobble a video experience together. However, the creative team at Dentsu (CD Glen Hunt, AD Deborah Prenger and Copywriter Jonathan Careless) brought us on in the early stages of planning the broadcast spot and gave us an extra day of shooting exclusively for the interactive experience. And so, off we all went right in the middle of our Christmas holidays to make some Lexus sexiness.

(- Fortunately that shoot was in Miami).

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November 7, 2011

by catherine

9 Things Wrong With Your SEO (& How To Fix It)

We here at Jam3 routinely see sites that suffer from low traffic volume, poor conversion and high bounce rates. These symptoms are usually indicative of a whole host of problems from bad writing to bad design. You might think that where you land in search results is completely arbitrary and you’re at the mercy of Google (or whatever search engine you happen to use), but that’s not the case. With thoughtful SEO, you’ll be flying to the top of those results in no time. Read the rest of this entry »

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August 26, 2011

by adrian

Vote for these Jam3 SXSW Panels

Jam3’s looking to invade SXSW Interactive in 2012, and we have more ammo and explosive content than a Michael Bay flick.

There’s plenty of methods to our madness at Jam3 and we want to share some of that with you at the SXSW Interactive conference this coming year. Give them some love and support their initiatives in the talks they aim to present.

The smörgåsbord of topics range from design to tech to production. We’ve got mouthwatering material on creating tools to implement a creative team’s vision, and theories on how “less code is the best kind of code.” We’ve got an in depth look at audio responsive visualizations, and a little digital storytelling production guidance for you broadcast/film folk to cap it all off.

Our People and Talk Titles:
Mikko Haapoja’s “Less Code More Cool”
Aaron Morris’s “Teaching Laziness: Coding Efficiency for Beginners”
Salpy Kelian and Cole Sullivan’s “Audio Visualization: a DIY Guide”
Adrian Belina’s “Producing Digital Narratives for Brands or Film”

Come vote the shit out of this and support your fellow digital peeps in Jam3‘s epic takeover of SXSW’s 2012 best Interactive Conference Ever.

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/index/10/company:jam3

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