Sapient Project for Carnival
The concept of this activation was to celebrate 4th of July with the Marines stationed at the Miramar Air Station in San Diego California. To do this we would create a “Socially powered BBQ”. Through the use of Twitter, Facebook & Instagram people would send their thank you’s to the web via the #thankyouburger hashtag.
The data would be scraped and then put into queue to be laser etched onto hamburger buns and given to the Marines at the BBQ on the base.
Originally I was brought in on this project to help provide support on the laser etching of the hamburger since I’ve worked with machines like this back in my sign making days. It afforded me the opportunity to travel to Golden Colorado twice in 2 weeks to visit the laser company, Epilog Laser. I’ve never been to Colorado so that was a treat also Voodoo Donuts are amazing!
During my time there I was able to capture some behind the scenes of the prototyping sessions for my eventual analysis of the best buns to use, Wonder Bread Classic Hamburger Bun was the winner btw.
With the buns selected and the laser details dialed in I started prepping to fly out and shoot B-Roll in San Diego before the event. Three days before I was to leave I was told that another experience was being added to the event. I was asked to come up with a way to take pictures of each Marine with bun and send the photos to the Miami team so they could match the Marine to the person on the bun they were holding. Then re-tweet, re-gram or reply on facebook to the original poster with the photo of the Marine. Yes it was crazy.
I set up two stations each with a laptop with Lightroom & Dropbox installed, 15′ usb cable, Canon 5Dmkiii with a 24-70mm f/2.8 & a Verizon hot spot. The solution that I came up with was to use Lightroom’s tether capture and point all captures to a Dropbox folder that the Miami team had access to. This would allow me to shoot photos and have whatever I captured automatically upload to Dropbox.
Since we were relying on a hot spot in the middle of an air force base with little to no cellular coverage I had to drop the photo quality to medium jpg and the creative team wanted all the photos in 1×1 crop. So I had to use live view in order to capture the actual crop in camera to reduce another step once the photos were synced via Dropbox back to Miami. Once the photos synced the Miami team tagged the appropriate person and moved the images into an Amazon S3 container so they could be an actual live url for sharing across social media.
It was a pretty amazing experience. I was taking pics and with in a few mins the original posters were getting responses back! I lost count of how many Marines I asked to show me there buns.