I initiated a partnership between PointRoll and Cut&Paste to develop a 3 city event tour, with stops in Austin TX (for SXSWi), San Francisco and New York City. Since PointRoll was the leader in cutting edge digital ad solutions and Cut &Paste housed a network of top digital designers, illustrators, and animators, the tour was designed to speak strongly to the digital creative community. What better way to show how PointRoll pushes creative limits than by hosting a three unique large scale digital design battles!
To launch the event series my team and I produced the first SXSW live design battle at The Belmont in Austin, Texas. We had four celebrity artists split in two teams square off against each other while world famous DJ, RAC, performed live on stage. By tasking the designers with the challenge of re-imagining and illustrating Pluto as a habitable planet, we threw the designers the keys to our spacecraft and went for a roundtrip journey to outer space. With the help from our sponsors Mountain Dew, BlinQ Media, and Green Label Sound the event was a major success, drawing in crowds of top tier clients, like Sony Playstation and Google, and generated a ton of buzz for the Pointroll brand.
After SXSWi, we wanted the design competition to correlate closer to PointRoll's line of business and decided that interactive 'gaming' design should be the basis of the competition, so we coined the phrase 'Gamified' to be the theme of our next two shows. This was a first for Cut&Paste for they had never hosted a competition where designers and developed teamed up to create a video game live on stage.
In each 'Gamified' event, there were three teams of designers who had to work against time while mirroring their computer screens on 20ft screens onstage for attendees to watch as they worked through the design and coding process. We challenged the teams to create the ultimate game interface design live-on-stage based on the themes "Trick out My Ride" in San Francisco and "We Gotta Talk" in NYC. The audience was able to interact with the design teams by submittin sketches to be incorporated into each of the game concepts and then vote for their favorite team via twitter.