David Emery OnlineRead All About It
16 April 2011
A few weeks ago now I had the wonderful privilege of working again with Radiohead, this time on the release of The King Of Limbs but more specifically on the distribution of The Universal Sigh, a free newspaper distributed globally on the day of the physical release of the album.
It was quite fun.
It also turns out that doing something in 30-odd territories across the world at the same time on the same day is bloody difficult, but we got there in the end.
Early on in the project we decided that we wanted the online element to try and represent the activity of the event in progress, rather then replicate the actual content in any way (so no official PDF downloadable version, for example) as the whole idea stemmed around the actual physical artefact that is the newspaper. So, to try and represent the event we decided that as we controlled the distribution directly, we could endeavour to take a photo of practically everyone that received a copy, and have a live stream of those photos appear on the site.
Originally we were going to use Instagram to do it, which with their realtime APIs seemed perfect for the job (especially as we wanted to do it geo-located so you could see photos at specific locations). However, those pesky “international” issues scuppered us on this front; it turns out plenty of the world doesn’t really have iPhones yet, and Instagram is iPhone only at this point. So, instead we resorted to the venerable Flickr which as it turned out worked pretty nicely anyway, with a combination of some locations uploading photos in realtime via iPhones and others using regular cameras and uploading them later.
In total, we took almost 11,000 photos in 52 different locations which I think it pretty awesome if I do say so myself. It was pretty amazing to have the homepage open on the day and watch all the photos stream in.
We also did some other pretty cool things on the website (very ably put together by Chris and Naomi), my favourite bit being the custom coloured Google Maps on the locations pages which use the Google Maps API v3.
Oh, and the fact we got Thom and Stanley to show up at the London location?
Priceless.