“Step by step, a group of painters brought the perfect Stella Artois to life as a 20 x 50 foot stop-frame animation high over the New York City streets. And in the process, they revealed an untold story of tradition, sacrifice, and an industry dangling preciously on the brink of extinction.”

This first video is the project from start to finish, shot in time-lapse.

The Ritual Project – final timelapse from The Ritual Project on Vimeo.

This second video is the documentary about the painters and the dying art of huge mural advertising as vinyl becomes cheaper in rough economic times.

UP THERE from Jon on Vimeo.

The effort put into this campaign should not be overlooked. I don’t live in NYC, so there is no way I would have seen this project taking form other than the documentation of it via “The Ritual Project”. I suppose Stella wanted the project to documented and thus sponsored “Up There”.

While we’re here talking about Stella you may as well check their homepage, where you can win a trip to Cannes. This is the first time I’ve seen a webpage like this ask you to connect to Facebook upon entry. Normally this is something I wouldn’t do before really understanding what I was connecting to, but because I’ve been looking at all these Stella ads I thought I would take a chance. When you get into the site after connecting with Facebook, a video starts showing a bunch of rich people looking for the person who is going to attend Cannes. The cool part is when they start going through photos of people, you see images of your friends, and then they finally end up on a picture of you. They got me at first. I wondered how my friends had been put onto the webpage, then remembered the Facebook connect.

Well played Stella, I’ll cheers to that.

Last weekend I went with Ben Metcalfe to the Maker Fair at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. The best way I’ve heard this fair described is, “Burning Man meets the tech world.” The Maker Fair showcases Arts, Crafts, Engineering, Food, Music, Science and Technology. Above is a video of the two guys you’ve seen a million times on YouTube dropping Mentos into Diet Coke.

Here is a short list of some of the other awesome things I saw:

Mouse Trap, the old game, but blown up on a huge scale with bowling balls instead of marbles.

A machine that etches in wood and metal at ridiculous speeds. Basically a printer except it’s carving with a laser.

Bags made out of old rain jackets by City Bag Trade.

A huge city made out of Legos with running trains and whole districts.
Goats in a petting zoo!

Huge Metal sculptures of people. See picture.
exc…

Here are the links of some of their work, I recommend checking them all out.
Current company round3media round3media.com
Company Partners:
Alex Hillman – http://weknowhtml.com / http://www.dangerouslyawesome.com/
Ken Rossi – http://evolvestudios.com
Bart Mroz – http://bartekm.com / http://electronicsandbox.com

Selected Project of the Years
http://stevemullenphoto.com
http://fariassurf.com
http://llrpartners.com
http://wiki.answers.com
http://willotoons.com
http://noonaco.com
http://omnivestllc.com
http://www.llrpartners.com/
http://www.pdqlegal.com/
http://www.elationstore.com/
http://quintinfoundation.com/our-mission/
http://www.progresspt.com/
http://www.tackledirect.com/
http://www.exphone.org/
http://eap.org/
http://www.tllccf.org/
http://bluecoatgin.com/
http://fitzgeraldspectorinc.com/
http://pma-llc.com/