The Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance: A Multimedia Introduction

Since the Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance has now been officially opened, I can start talking about the gala kickoff event, which Bradley's Multimedia and Theatre programs collaborated on to produce.

I took point on a good deal of the interactive portions of the night: alumni text messaging onto the big screens, an interactive "Bradley College Bowl" quiz app that pitted tables against one another to answer BU trivia, and some apps to display photographs that were being taken and delivered to us behind the scenes with WiFi. We also built a special iPhone interface that showed photos being taken at the event and so that iPhone users wouldn't have to use SMS messages to participate.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the other people who did great work on this event, including Chad Udell with some campaign-themed generative art, Matt Forcum and Mitch Anderson who oversaw all the visual effects, Dave Look who produced the event and put out all kinds of fires, Brett Noe who was our director of photography for the video shoot, several dozen incredibly committed Multimedia and Theatre students, and of course Jim Ferolo and George Brown who were the masterminds behind it all.

I'm going to be working on documenting this. There's so many amazing elements that went into it. For one, Drupal was the key component behind all of this interactive madness, yet there was not a public Drupal site for the campaign; it was just used to handle workflow for approving and editing the text messages, and to push data to Flash via Services and AMFPHP and to the iPhones via Services and JSON.

Let me start this Herculean documentary effort with a little video that I took on our first day in the space. Notice the giant screen in the first shot. The room had four such screens, which were 26 feet wide and suspended above the stage in the center of the space.

The Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance from Sven on Vimeo.

Watch our blog for more information about this amazing event!