A hackawhhat you say? Well, Let me explain…

Put simply, a hackathon is an event where programmers (usually) have a short amount of time to “hack” together code in order to demo a cool idea or feature, it doesn’t have to be pretty, and it doesn’t have to work fully, but it has to illustrate an idea, a concept.

In our case (as with most) the hackathon ran from 6pm on Sunday to 7am on Monday, that’s over 12 hours of solid coding… tiring, but extremely fun! Don’t let all this talk of code fool you however, there wasn’t just a team of people haplessly typing on keyboards and writing code, we also had some teams working offline as well.

Simon and Tom planning how their HTML5 game will work

Tom and Rob in the early stages of their projects

Camilo doing some Zombie attack recovery planning

Keeping the adrenalin running, a quick 1am Nerf battle

Ben & Bryony turned our mundane shed into a DJ Booth

Our creative team getting their hands dirty with plasticine and some stop motion

Still awake, and still working, daylight had returned!

A quick mid project demo

Of course I had to chronicle the events of the night. By the end of the sprint we were tired, but not defeated, although we did all go home and sleep…

This year was the 10th Anniversary of Miniclip.com, to celebrate, all of the staff were flown from around the world to London, where the company first began, for a party. It was the first time in many years that all of Miniclip’s employees have been together in the same city.

In secret, 7 of us created a documentary to be shown at the party in front of all 130 employees, all filming was done out of hours, not even our CEO knew what we were doing. We were all dieing to tell everyone about what we were up to, but we couldn’t, the shroud of secrecy had to remain…

Let me set the scene for you, Miniclip’s CEO Rob Small visits London on the day of the company’s big 10th Anniversary party for all the Miniclip staff. The documentary follows him for the day as he explored the city and it’s sights!

If you’re wondering about the technical side, we used my Canon 7D as first unit, shooting 720p @ 50fps, mostly with either a Canon 10-22mm lens in the places where there wasn’t much space, and a Canon 24-70mm f2.8L for the rest of it. Second unit was filmed on 5 Flip UltraHD’s also shooting 720p @ 50fps.

Behind the scenes

Shooting at the Mint Hotel, London Bridge

Filming riding a Boris Bike

Filming at YO! Sushi

Shooting along the Southbank, London

Technical Details

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: EF 70-200mm f4 L @ 200mm / f4
Lighting: Natural

View on Flickr

Technical Details

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: EF 24-70mm f2.8 L @ 52mm / f11
Lighting: 2 x Sigma EF530 DG SUPER Flash / PhotoSEL LT-144 Light Tent with Black Backdrop

View on Flickr

Technical Details

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: EF 24-70mm f2.8 @ 50mm / f11
Lighting: 2 x Sigma EF530 DG SUPER Flash / PhotoSEL LT-144 Light Tent with Black Backdrop

View on Flickr

If you weren’t lucky enough to be there in person, Newspepper have released the video of my presentation at the April 2011 Facebook Developer Garage London.

Unfortunately the video is almost useless unless you can see the slides that I am presenting, so here they are again:

Again, I would love to know what you thought of it, so please let me know!