If you’re interested in owning your own, drop us an email to stamp@wearenation.co.uk to register your interest. You can also keep track of updates by following us on twitter @Nationstudio and joining the Facebook fan page

**NEW UPDATE**

Due to overwhelming demand, we’re proud to announce the opening of the Like/Dislike shop. See photos of the new stamps below. The main difference is the new stamp is half the size of the prototype. Oh and while we were fiddling around we also created a ‘Dislike’ stamp. Any questions you can still reach us at stamp@wearenation.co.uk

New Stamps:

CLICK HERE TO BUY NOW FROM OUR ONLINE SHOP!

Prototype:

It was our lead developer Chris’s birthday last week. We bought him cupcakes from the lovely Crumbs and Doilies, and because Chris dreams in binary and solves problems with function();s we customised the cakes with some sweet sweet code.

As is the way with most design studios we spent a couple of weeks before Christmas scrambling to get something together to send out to clients, friends and anyone else we may have worked with over the past year. Despite being a digital studio, we were tired and unimpressed by 99% of the ‘digital Christmas cards’ we’d seen over the past couple of years and know that the people we work with are similarly unimpressed. We wanted to produce something that may be of some use and would hopefully engage with people for more than 5 seconds.

We decided on kicking it old school and printing a Newspaper featuring all the interesting things we’d seen, enjoyed and been inspired by in 2009. Videos, product designs, computer games, installations, experiments, interesting blogs and even some stuff that served no purpose at all. To run along side the Newspaper we built a mobile friendly blog featuring further info and video of the stuff in action. The newspaper features QR codes and shortcodes to enable people reading the paper to quickly jump to a video they were interested in or simply pull the blog up on their mobile device/computer and browse along as they read the paper.

You can see more photos in the Nation flickr stream and if you didn’t receive one and you like a copy of the paper send us an A4 envelope with 2 x 1st class stamps on it and we’ll pop one in the mail for you.

Our address:
Nation,
Top Floor Studio,
51 Hoxton Square,
London,
N1 6PB

Starting on the 22nd of December we recreated the movie ‘Home Alone’ using 22 different twitter profiles collected into a single twitter list. The @HATProject was an experiment, a test to see if transplanting the full narrative of a film on to a social network would work and to see how people would respond. The video below (not made by us, but by this chap, explains it better than we could ourselves)

There was no money in it obviously, but we thought it’d be an interesting use of twitter, entertaining for the people that followed it and a fun project for Nation and it was. Several people that followed the ‘tweet-movie’ as it played out asked for a blog post explaining how we accomplished it. So here goes nothing…

So at some point last year Tom wrote on a post-it note “All the characters from a movie, talking to each other through Twitter. In real time.” It stayed stuck to the wall sitting amongst a stack of other similarly off the cuff ideas, most of which never go anywhere. Two weeks ago we started wrapping up our paid projects in preparation for the Christmas break and we realised we might have enough time to make the ‘Twitter Movie Narrative Project’ thing… happen.

The project owes a debt to things like Six to Start’s ‘We Tell Stories‘, Tom Davenport’s Peep Show tweets and a nod to our friend Simon Whybray who dabbled with putting the characters from ‘Hackers’ onto twitter. So it’s not a new idea or massively original but we wanted to see how it would play out especially involving other mediums like Twitpic and Youtube.

Home Alone was actually one of the first films we considered; most of us already knew it off by heart, it’s set at Christmas over a definite number of days, has a relatively small amount of central characters and it’s very likable. Starting the project on the 22nd and finishing on Christmas day seemed perfect.

The Tech
So we started looking at the best way of making the @HATProject happen, admittedly we could have just all sat around furiously typing in tweets for 4 days but we figured there must be an easier way of deploying hundreds of tweets across multiple accounts at specific times. The furious typing still happened to an extent as we adjusted, fixed and tried to improve tweets (for example Mitch Murphy was added in at the last moment). We toyed with using a server-side Twitter Bot script, which seemed to work well for one twitter account but not for multiples. In the end we settled on using SocialOomph which can handle multiple twitter accounts, and an infinite number of scheduled tweets.

The Set-Up
The next step was to set up the twitter accounts. We figured out all the characters we needed for the core narrative and some we’d like to include just for kicks like Little Nero’s Pizza and the Illinois Police Department. We wrote short bio’s for each character and tried to add relevant background images to their profile pages. For example @BuzzMcCal’s profile background came from Googling the issue of Playboy Kevin pulls out of the trunk (which is from July 1989, if you’re interested) followed by a quick image search.

We got a core version of the script by grabbing a subtitles (.srt) file to gave us a base, but on watching the film we realised the file didn’t match up exactly, swear words were deleted and lines were shortened. We wanted it to be as accurate as possible so we went through the text file, watching the movie side-by-side and edited lines, added the @twitternames to denote characters, added in ‘looks’ using emoticons and UTF8 characters like ✈ where it was relevant. We grabbed images we felt might pass for character’s photos to upload to twitpic, and found the unedited version of ‘Angels With Dirty Souls’ which was already on Youtube.

Once the script, images and video were sorted we started adding them into the socialOomph account and figuring out the timeline.

Mistakes & Artistic License
We made one quite big mistake but managed to gloss over it relatively seamlessly, we missed a day out. Technically the film starts on the night of the 21st, the 22nd the McCalisters leave for Paris, the 23rd Kevin runs into Marv and Harry for the first time, the 24th The Wet Bandits return and Kevin defends the house with the conclusion on the morning of the 25th. Due to an oversight (which we’ll put down to our excitement in getting the thing kicked off) we ended up starting on the 22nd and smashing together the 23rd and 24th into one single day.

Another issue arose with timing. Due to the way SocialOomph works it can only publish tweets down to the minute. Obviously there’s a set order to the script and if tweets are published in the wrong order it breaks it. So if you schedule multiple tweets for the same minute they’re published in no discernible order. We resolved this by basically scheduling one tweet per minute, which again doesn’t exactly correlate with the ‘real time’ aspect of the project. For example Kevin and Old man Marley’s conversation in the church is about 5 minutes in length in the film but due to the one-tweet-a-minute restriction we had it play out over an hour. While this is a discrepancy of sorts it did mean that tweets were published at a rate where followers could keep up and hopefully didn’t feel like they were being spammed.

We also took a fair amount of artistic license with certain parts of the script. For example the scene where Kevin talks to Santa Claus we basically made into a one-way conversation to avoid having to create more twitter characters. The same applied to the scene with Kate in airport right before she meets Gus Polinksi for the first time. We also added in a tweet or two to squeeze in stuff we thought was interesting, for example Gus’s Polka paraphernalia which is from an old John Candy sketch we stumbled upon.

The Future
The obvious next step would be to do Home Alone 2: Lost in New York next year, which I’m sure we will, but it might be fun to try other stuff out too if we have the time (Die Hard was suggested by one follower ) and hopefully we’ll see other people try their own versions of movies on twitter. Next year we’d like to figure out a way for more audience interaction, and other ways of bringing in things like Youtube to make the whole thing more engaging.

Due to paid work absorbing a lot of the studios time a majority of the set-up and execution was carried out by Tom… not 22 individuals as claimed by some twitterers, and in total probably took about 2-4 working days to set-up (not including the time we spent watching it happen.. just to make sure it was working and reading the feedback we were getting).

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions leave a comment below or you can drop an email to tom@wearenation.co.uk

We just got delivery of our new cards from Generation Press and we couldn’t be happier with the outcome. We make digital stuff, but there’s still nothing quite like getting something printed. It’s almost rude not to link to this video after talk like that.

See more in our flickr stream here

Unfortunately for Fran (our new and most excellent intern) the only desk currently free to sit at in the studio is where our server sits. Tom discovered a new way to creatively direct the work she’s been doing with screen-sharing, Ustream.com and a webcam. As well as having his giant face loom-large, we stream music from that computer so his voice booms out through the stereo.

Fran quickly located the off switch on the monitor.

A little bit early perhaps but we fancied displaying some pumpkins in the window of our studio for the week running up to Halloween so we decided to eat our body-weight in sweets and carve up some gourds. We’ve also been listening to the Halloween 3 ‘Silver Shamrock’ theme on loop in the studio. Good times.

See more photos on flickr here

Nations first studio trip had to be good, and since we can’t quite stretch to speedboats in the Bahamas (Give us a year) we decided to show the un-initiated what Alton Towers is all about. Rollercoasters. Big Ones. Oh and it was the Halloween ‘Scarefest’ so we ran through some corn fields being chased by zombies too. No Really.

See more photos over on Flickr.

While summer isn’t quite “officially” over, The temperature makes It seem like nothing but a distant memory already. We’re without any central heating in the studio, so purchased a couple of heaters to try and keep the place toasty, while we were at it we’ve tried to make in feel warmer too so have set this up in our empty fireplace.

Make you’re own studio ‘Augmented Fireplace’ with this video, this Greasemonkey script and a projector.