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Monday 2 February 2012
A call out to Mark




Facebookito ergo sum. You can't really call yourself much these days, if you're not on Facebook. So one of the first things we did when founding Funk-e a few years back, was getting ourselves a nice little Facebook profile. We hooked up with all our friends, placed some pictures of our first animations, our work space, and let everyone know how we were doing. But after a while, Facebook wanted all companies to get themselves a fan page instead of a profile.

So, guess what? We got ourselves a fan page.

And so, after some time we – like many companies and other organizations out there – ended up having a Facebook profile and a Facebook fan page. Not good. It's quite a lot of work to keep both places up to date, manage your on-line contacts at two places and have your contacts spread apart in two different little on-line worlds. But putting a stop to either of the two on-line spots would mean losing touch with people we’d love to keep in touch with.

So we decided to go about testing some of the new Facebook tools out there to help us fix this problem. First of all, we converted our profile to a page. That sounds a heck lot easier than it is. Error this, security so, error that. ‘Please log-in on the pc you’ve used before.’ New pc? Too bad, sucker. But finally, after a few days of Googling guess what? It worked out!

Next, we had two pages, and tried to merge them into one. Again, a Facebook tool would have been nice. Facebook offers the option to merge any of your pages with another page, as long as they both have the same name. But (!) only the smaller of the two pages is eligible for a merge into the bigger one. And – guess what - we wanted to merge the bigger into the smaller one. Luckily, we at Funk-e have a lot of really cool friends and could get some peeps liking our fan page in a jiffy, which is why we now only have one super duper cool page left.

Thanks everyone for helping us out.

But why is Facebook making it all so complicated? And why is all the help on the website so hard to understand? Why did we need to turn to Google to understand and find anything to support us on Facebook? Why doesn’t Facebook make instructions just plain stupid easier?

BOOM!

Introducing.. Funk-e. Maybe mr. Zuckerberg and his colleagues should consider to hire us for a new explanimation sometime. If you guys are not too busy entering the stock market of course. We'd love to help you out.


Placed by Funk-e Branding at 17:17

Monday 1 January 2012
About foley - making custom sound FX

Have you ever wondered how the sound of a glass bottle breaking is made? ehm.... by simply breaking a bottle and keeping a microphone close to it you might say? 

Well, not always. First of all recording sound FX means you need to stand close to the object, and since not everyone particularly enjoys having glass in his face, or standing in an explosion we sometimes need to reproduce sounds in different ways.

So some smart guys came up with Foley, this is the art of reproducing or recording the sounds that we see in a movie but that microphones can not get close enough to or reproduce accurately enough.

So for those of you that might be interested, here is a video that gives a bit of a quick explanation of how all these great sound effects that you hear in movies and our animations are born. As you can see, these small details are what can really a difference in an animation or movie, but they also take a lot of time. 


This is also how most of our sound effects that we often still use, such as the "pop" sound, or the "page flip" sound at the end of all our animations were made. Of course we also do a lot of stuff digitally, since it simply takes less time.

But then again, nothing beats the authenticity of foley sound FX. So if you ever have some spare time and want to make your video more interesting, try making the sound FX by yourself. You will also realize that splashing stuff in buckets, throwing stuff on the ground, smacking objects on a table, is really a lot of fun.


Placed by Funk-e Branding at 24:25

Monday 1 January 2012
Saving students from poverty

In the last months we have been working very hard to make awesome animated explanations, but we now believe the time has come to do something back for our fellow youngsters. We truly believe in giving back to the people that helped us so much throughout this time: our friends our fans, fellow students, fellow ex-students that have supported us so thoroughly deserve much more than just a silly pat on the shoulder.

So we thought, what could we do to help these poor students, that are known to have such a hard life, scraping the last coins together to pay for that last beer that they so deserve after so much hard work.

And what better way to help these hardworking students pay for beer than... Money!

So there you go, we will now reward every great referral you send our way that ends up in an animation with 150 nice, shiny, pretty Euro's.

For more information check out www.funk-e.nl/referral





Placed by Funk-e Branding at 11:59

Thursday 1 January 2012
Guaranteed viral succes!

So you want an animation that goes viral? Well, who doesn't?

Actually, a lot of our clients ask us to produce an explanation video that goes viral. Meaning buckets and buckets filled with views. No, what am I saying? Thousands, millions or even trillions! Everyone in the world talking about that particular video. Everybody spreading it around, like some contagious disease.

We used to think it's not possible to guarantee a viral success. I mean, we always strive for the best possible result. But explaining a concept is our core business, and the goal to reach as many viewers as possible easily interferes with the explanatory function of the video.

It takes a real well done campaign to absolutely guarantee a viral effect. And even when you do everything right, it might still fail because you’re out of luck. And, it takes a lot of money. One can't expect a 150-grand campaign on a budget of a thousand dollars. Or else, you might just be plain old buying your publicity after all.

But boy, were we wrong. Because – apparently - now you can get a guaranteed viral! And the bizarre thing is, anyone can do it. Watch this video and see for yourself. Enjoy!



Placed by Funk-e Branding at 17:47

Friday 11 November 2011
Funk-e: 3 years of evolution

Awesome. That's the first word I could come up with when 2 days ago we realized we started this business 3 years ago.

If you think about the fact that we started like this


And then we had our first office


And now Funk-e has upgraded everything to this sweet place in the city center of Rotterdam


It's kinda crazy... Things are moving fast, and we are loving it.

We like our new office, it kinda looks ehm, really fancy. Wanna come check it out? The Funk-e team will be happy to welcome you for a good old cup of espresso at Aert van Nesstraat 45 on the top floor.  (Owyeah, you are reading that correctly.. top floor :)

Awesome.


Placed by Funk-e Branding at 17:49

Funk-e Blog

In our blog we write about the things we see, think and do. Subjects we focus on are animation, online marketing, branding and of course our customers. Enjoy!