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B-Reel Berlin - Party, Love & Döners

America’s Most Promising Companies

Fun with WebSockets

"Palme" - our Docu Blockbuster

Web Lab makes it to the stage

B-Reel

In February 2013, B-Reel was invited to curate an evening of talks at Glug, an after-work creative drinks and Notworking event for designers, creatives, clients and friends. B-Reel brought together all the key creative partners who worked on Chrome Web Lab to speak at the event, titled “Collaboration Economy”.

B-Reel chaired the evening of talks, with B-Reel Products’ Creative Director, Riccardo Giraldi, flying the flag to speak on behalf of the B-Reel team. The B-Reelers were joined onstage by Google Creative Labs, Tellart, BarberOsgerby / MAP / UDS,  and Bibliotheque.

The evening was delivered into two halves. The topic for the first half allowed the speakers to talk about what collaboration means to them in their field of work. This gave the audience the chance to get to know the speakers and the expertise of the companies they represent. The Second half focussed on the Web Lab project and provided a deep dive into each partners core skills and gave a different viewpoint around the complexity, challenges and opportunities of working on Web Lab.

Watch all of the presentations here: http://bit.ly/151DzyU

Learn more about Web Lab here: http://bit.ly/ZLay1W

Introducing Escape Flight

B-Reel Products

Today, we are proud and excited to launch our latest, very own product. It’s called Escape Flight -- a website that has been specifically designed to inspire people in the big cities, who are looking for a last-minute weekend getaway. 

Sometimes, after a long busy week, all you want is to get away for the weekend to somewhere nice and sunny. But it can be hard to find the right solution in the online flight search jungle: Where should I go? What is the most convenient place? What events are happening? You can spend hours clicking through flight search websites and compare hundreds of different flight options without finding a good solution. Frustrating, isn’t it?

So we came up with the idea of Escape Flight, a one-stop provider that focuses on making your weekend getaway a no-brainer.

We have cherry-picked more than 100 great destinations all over Europe, from Barcelona to Pistoia (a hidden gem in Tuscany), Amsterdam to Setúbal (a picturesque fishing town not far from Lisbon). Every day, we find the most convenient direct flights to those destinations, but we only choose those leaving on Friday after work and returning on Sunday, so you don’t have to worry too much about planning the details. In addition, we also check for the weather to make sure you don’t end up in the middle of a snow storm. 

All you have to do is to set your preferences, and then our algorithm will do the rest: We combine timings, price, weather and your preferences in a super-computer, and filter only the good bits.
 
Instead of overwhelming you with hundreds of available flights and destinations, Escape Flight presents only a few getaway suggestions to make it easy and convenient to escape the big city without the hassle.
 
Whether the goal is to soak up some sun, try culinary treats, visit a music festival, or something else, you’ll find some inspiration on Escape Flight. If you see something you like, then your escape flight is only one click away.

B-Reel Berlin - Party, Love & Döners

B-Reel

Last week we announced the opening of our Berlin office, a great addition to the B-Reel family. And a great occasion to throw a party! Going down on a cold but vibrant Valentine’s day in Berlin, it was a full day for local B-Reelers and those traveling in from other offices. We started with an appearance at Regielounge, the great German mingle/show for people in commercials production. To celebrate the day we showed a Valentine’s special – a film about love through the lens of B-Reel.

Then we went to Soho House for a screening of our “docu-blockbuster” Palme – and the main event – our party afterwards. Besides B-Reelers, we were joined by our local friends, collaborators and co-conspirators. We had fun! And we take the fact we ended up having döners kebaps by the break of dawn as a sign this was all a great success. Tschüss!

America’s Most Promising Companies

B-Reel

We just heard something that made us very proud: B-Reel was named in Forbes annual list of America’s Most Promising Companies, receiving a ranking of no. 37. 

Being a company with Swedish roots it makes us think back to when we first set up shop in America. We rented a small room in New York City and started to pitch hybrid production to the USA. There is always some struggle when you’re trying to settle in a new place, and this was no exception. But after a couple of years we felt we had a good platform to work from. So much so that we dared to open an office in LA to better service the west coast. 

Establishing these offices have been fantastic experiences for our company. We have made new friends and gotten to work with so many talented people. We have created hundreds of projects to date, and we have learned a TON.

Together with our offices in London and Stockholm we have a great creative family that can share ideas and experiences. Thank you everyone who have helped on the way to where we are today, receiving this fine appreciation. Stay promising!

Fun with WebSockets

Simon Cave

Late in 2012, shortly before closing for Christmas and the New Year, a few of us who had mostly wrapped up work for the year sat down and decided to make something fun for our friends and followers for the holidays. What we ended up with was a rather off-beat and, frankly, kind of ridiculous toy. Check it out.

It's nearly February and somehow our quirky little creation is still getting traffic. We've been a little shocked by the positive response so I thought I'd share a little bit of back story and talk a little about how we made it.

Way back in November 2010, Apple released iOS 4.2.1 bringing a couple of handy additions to Safari. One of these additions was the WebSockets API, allowing iPhones and iPods to open a basic data socket to a server. This opened up a fun possibility: using your phone as a remote controller for an app running on your desktop. Phones are great input devices. They have multi-touch displays. They have an accelerometer and a gyroscope for detecting motion and orientation. As we had just finished creating Mitsubishi Live Drive I got to work creating a small experiment to see if an iPhone could be used as a steering wheel. It used Node.js on the back-end. Here's the result:

iPhone Steering

WebSockets are now available in almost every browser, including Safari on iOS and Chrome on Android. Internet Explorer is unsurprisingly the notable exception, but support has been added in version 10 (currently Windows 8 only, but soon to be released on Windows 7) and the terrific Socket.io package uses a Flash fall-back to provide very broad support.

It's been three years since WebSockets became available on phones and many fun and clever creations have been made making use of them. Throughout 2012 we kept finding ourselves returning to the concept, creating prototypes for various client briefs and sometimes just for our own enjoyment. Here's a very basic game using your phone's accelerometer:

Note: While our Christmas Card works on any iOS or Android device, the other experiments linked to here are iPhone-only.

Another experiment allows you to fling dog treats from your phone to your screen (dog not included):

Dog Treats

We've been particularly interested in mixing touch devices as remote controllers and the WebAudio API to make interesting tactile musical instruments. Here's an example which uses the device motion APIs on your phone and the WebAudio API on your desktop to mix three channels of audio:

This brings us back to the Christmas Card. We're running a simple Node.js server accepting socket connections using Socket.io from desktop and mobile browsers and pairing them using a four-digit pin code sent to the desktop browser. The WebAudio API is used to play sounds in time with the backing track. Elements are animated using CSS Transforms and Filters.

Click here to try it out