Every now and then, we get a stonker of an unsolicited application. Here's one just in (name changed but otherwise unaltered):

Hello ?

Somebody sseer ?

OK, I will start… So, here I am. Yes.

Misha is the name. Misha, yes … It is only written with "sh" as in french France, they do not have the "sch". Did you know that ? I didn't, before I heard of. They also heaven, no — havn' — have not gott (damned) "got" the "W". Did you know that ? Thsi is why my sirname at the end is written with "ff". Ja, Ja, that's what it is like… And you ? How are you doing ?

Here, it's fine, so long. Quite warm today, nearly 20 Celsiusses (or "Celsi" ?) imagine this one. Went biking for 2 hours… Oh, "cycling", moreuber, Sorry ! My English sacks a bit. But my prrronauncaician is qwite fine — rreelly now !

Hm, what did I want ? Oh, yes: Ahm (this is German for "Er"), so you guys are running a firm that tries to make such things like — publi…advent…publi-commarketing — such stuff ?

Becaouse, I kuutt be tempted to give it a try as well. Oh, Yes. Yes, Yes, Yes… I ssought ssatt maybe for maquing for you, and your companies you work for as well, clear, so to say that perhaps, if you do not mind, only, for sure ! To make my point rather earlier than later, I had the idea becom — to — for (?) becoming, no: getting for you a — Copywriter ? (Finally !) Hmm ? Would this amuse you a bit, maybe ?

 Becaouaose I am have true super idears, ErHmmm ! Funny ones. All my friends always luuf about me. And ssey call me "The Enabler". Yes, Yes, Yes… Kuutt I has ssis tytle on my name-ticket ?

 Come on, you DO want to hire me, right ? 🙂 Ssis is no problem, london*, you are not allone, we tschust had to having has to neg…talk about all the money I want to have from you.

*Is it allowed to have sis prename in London ?

You must not have to… You do not… I expect… I have time, so don't… You know what I mean ?

 Now I am a bit exh–ATCHOOO ! (Wait a second…TRUMPEEEEET !!! Sorry, I have a cold cuff)…a bit flat (plat ? plat-flat ?) me am now, from sis masterpeace hier.

 So, Oh ! time is overtooking me, the counter in this internet cafe without cafe says that…10 seconds, Oh my God, london, I am waiting for your r… [PLOPP !]

So for the last 15 days, Laura E, Laura W, Leah, Nico, and me (and the occasional appearance by Ben) have been spending about half the day putting together daily visualisations that show the awesomeness of our Grid runners.

We might have eaten a bit too much Haribo.

And gone a bit crazy with making Grid jokes. But now it's all over, here's a little bit about how we put all those videos together.

Each day, we got a copy of the database from AKQA and started looking through it for interesting stories. Who's run the most? Which team's done the most? Are the girls running more, or the boys? Who ran on rainy days? What postcodes were the busiest?

That bit normally takes some time. Some days it's been easier, some days it's been harder. Each video has to show something interesting as well as be great at attracting people to Grid and to get running. We also had to balance that against drawing too much attention to the top-performing individuals and teams, and making sure that the game still felt approachable to more casual runners.

That all gets pulled out of the database by writing some gnarly SQL, which spits out a CSV file. We stick that into the data visualisation app that Stamen made for us, based on OpenStreetMap data, and then wait a bit.

The reason why we wait a bit is because the app makes video for us by making 5.5mb TIFF files at 1080p, one for each frame. We've probably amassed around three quarters of a terabyte's worth of animation stills. That's nearly a Geocities worth. We then feed them into Quicktime Pro 7 to stitch together the stills into an uncompressed video.

Nico then sticks that into After Effects and Final Cut, and we all put together the script for the video. It gets uploaded for approval, and then uploaded to YouTube and shared over to the Facebook account and tweeted all over the place. AKQA then pulled them over automatically on to the front page of the Nike Grid site.

It was fun coming up with new ways to slice what we had.

There was Girls vs Boys:

Rainy runners (when, unsurprisingly for autumn in London, it rained all day):

And while our runners were running, the tube stopped. So that was a good one to do, too.

Oh, and Halloween.

 You can see all of the videos that we put together on the Nike Grid YouTube channel.