TWITTER
'CHARITY SWEARBOX'

AWARDS

Webby Awards 2012 – Honoree- Charity Organization/Non-profit

This was a little project a buddy and I did out of the kindness of our hearts. There was no client or agency involved, just a sweet little idea and some help from some friends at Fueled to get it built.

THE IDEA

We all know what a swearbox is; say a bad word, and put a coin in a tin, but what about all the filth that gets spouted everyday on Twitter? Well, that’s where Swearbox comes in.

This an idea that’s been bubbling around for nearly two years now, and bringing it to life with guys spread across three different time zones (with James Dow and Rameet Chawla), all working in our spare time, was definitely a challenge, but we’re pretty happy with the result and look forward for raising lots of money for good causes.

Simply log on to CharitySwearbox.com where the clever little app recognises all of your recently tweeted swear words, and suggests a reasonable donation. Or, if you’ve been good and not sworn at all, you can let rip with a swear-filled tweet right there in the app and select from a list of charities and donate via Paypal. Those who choose to connect their Twitter account will receive a monthly reminder with a tally of all their bad words, so the benevolence continues.

Finally there’s no need to hold back on Twitter, you can swear your filthy little face off, safe in the knowledge that it’s all for a good curse. Fucking marvellous.

Here’s some of the PR.

THE BRIEF

Despite being the largest chip manufacturer in the world, consumer knowledge that Intel processors are now in tablet computers is almost non-existent. We needed to take this message to a young audience.

THE STRATEGY

Given the broad market sector these devices are targeted towards, we needed an idea that would appeal to a hard-to-reach millennial audience, but also prove interesting to Intel’s core fan-base, who love to ‘look under the hood’ at the technical side of Intel’s endeavours.

THE IDEA

To announce the exciting new prospect of Intel-powered tablets to the world in an interesting and shareable way, we collaborated with Australian musician and producer Flume, to create a piece of branded content that showcased the creative potential of 60 Intel-powered tablets.

The resultant collaboration led to ‘Intelligent Sounds’; a band of fully-functional tablet-powered sound and light instruments that were custom-made to perform Flume’s bespoke musical composition.

THE TECHNOLOGY

Several apps were designed from scratch to connect all the devices and bring the whole project to life, one listening for frequency and volume to react to certain triggers, one to send MIDI signals over Wi-Fi, and one to create equaliser and waveform effects on the faces of the tablets. A master app also synced all the robots to hit the right notes at the right time based on the Ableton MIDI sequence created by Flume.

Although the ‘Intelligent Sounds’ band was designed to play Flume’s track, they are capable of playing virtually any piece of music and will potentially be integrated into Flume’s live shows going forward.

FLUME

The brief to Flume was to structure the track to build from a delicate analogue intro into an epic digital crescendo, and we designed the lighting for each instrument to visually represent the sounds he created (E.g. the vocals as a medical laser shining through a frosted glass rotating in time with the vocal accents).

Quote from Flume: “I didn’t want to make it easy. I wanted to write something how I write regardless and just see how it came out. And I think it’s cooler because if that. There’s so much cool stuff… I love the challenge of writing music for a particular project and a defined theme. I find working within these boundaries inspires, rather than limits creativity.”

THE ARIA AWARDS

As a fitting end to the project, Flume, who was nominated for an unprecedented eight ARIA Awards (the Australian equivalent of The GRAMMYs) extended the piece written for the Intelligent Sounds project into a full-length track, and performed it in front of a national TV audience at the award show.

And as an added brand tie-in, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra who accompanied Flume on stage, used Intel-powered tablets to display their sheet music.

RESULTS

3.8+ MILLION VIEWS SO FAR
OVER 175,000 FACEBOOK ACTIONS (LIKES, COMMENTS & SHARES)
FEATURED ON 600+ BLOGS AND NEWS SITES