Hasta La Creative!

If you want to see your next selfie brought to life as a real-time mosaic of moving thread, Forever 21 and Breakfast are happy to help—and the results are pretty stunning.

About a year and half ago, the Los Angeles-based clothing retailer hired the Brooklyn agency to build from scratch a giant, digitally synced adjustable billboard made of cloth, wood and aluminum, to name a few materials—the contraption includes some 200,000 parts, with 6.7 miles of fabric. And now, it’s is ready to launch.

Now through next Tuesday, the machine will be up and running 24 hours a day, rendering versions of Instagram photos hashtagged #F21ThreadScreen while cameras stream it live at f21threadscreen.com—and send users auto-edited clips of their photos being recreated.

Here’s the live stream:

The mechanics alone are wildly inventive, if not borderline insane—6,400 wooden spools feature rainbow ribbons that spin to change among 36 colors, according to computerized directions, with each spool ultimately serving as a single pixel in an 80-by-80 “pixel” image. Ultimately, the renderings themselves are just shy of hypnotizing, with the shifting palettes creating an iridescent effect as the images morph.

“Forever 21 was looking to experiment with something quite different than what they’ve done in the past,” says Breakfast co-founder and chief creative officer Andrew Zolty. “They gave us a rather open brief, and from the start we knew we wanted to build a web-connected experience that anyone could try from anywhere in the world.”

He adds: “We focused on thread, with it being the most basic element of fashion and quite versatile. We also focused on Instagram, as it’s the most artistic/creative of social networks, and Forever 21 has a massive following on there. [With 7.5 million followers, it’s 45th most followed account.] The idea developed from there.”

Here’s the behind-the-scenes video:

In broad terms, it’s familiar territory for Breakfast. Three years ago, the shop built a black-and-white pixel-based street billboard that silhouetted passersby for TNT. It’s also no stranger to building unique hardware with social media tie-ins—it created Instaprint, an event photo booth business that prints Polaroid-style photos based off Instagram hashtags, and offers to hand-craft bigger mosaics out of the individual prints. And in 2014, the shop picked up an Innovation Lion at Cannes for Points, its Internet-smart street sign.

But the F21 machine—11 feet high, 9 feet wide and 3 feet deep, with several times the number of parts in a modern automobile, all custom designed—is its biggest build yet.

“If we designed a car, we could redesign a single part and replace it if necessary,” says Zolty. “With this screen, when a part didn’t turn out quite right, we’d be sitting on 10,000-plus of them most often. You also may not know there is a problem until 5,000 have been installed. Re-creating and installing that part isn’t really an option, so you have to figure out a way? to keep moving forward while also solving the problem.”

Not since Kill Bill has there been a wedding this disastrous and darkly mesmerizing. As some adorable gingerbread people prepare to wed, a duck descends on the scene in savage fashion, mutilating the wedding party and attendees alike.

Obviously, it's an ad for Oatmeal Crisp.

The link between concept and product is tenuous at best, but luckily there's an angry Scotsman around to explain that as crunchy as that situation was, it can't compare to Oatmeal Crisp. Check out three more spots from the campaign after the jump. Via Adrants.

Here's a fun toy for obsessive baseball geeks: the new "Mission Control" installation at MLB's "Fan Cave" space in downtown New York. There, each year, a selection of the sport's most die-hard fans are paid to watch every game and crank out social-media content about the experience, part of a Lord-of-the-Flies-esque competition to get to the World Series. This year, the space also features a custom multi-screen computer rig, built by Breakfast, that's designed to pull in and display a wide range of data about the upcoming baseball season. The smaller screens on the left and right include video feeds of stadiums from American League and National League teams (even when the games aren't in progress). The toggles on the bottom calls up information like weather conditions and wind speeds at each location, as well as relevantly tagged Instagram and Twitter posts about the ballparks and their home teams. The dashboard meters measure stats like total games played and total number of hits for the season. The central monitor connects to a camera that can be used to record and broadcast video clips of the sports stars and other celebrities who stop by for concerts and other events, and of the "Fan Cave" marketing program's less famous participants. Why? Because all you've ever wanted since you were a little kid was to be a professional baseball commentator and astronaut at the same time. If that doesn't ring true, you're probably not invited.