The House of Laudanum’s team scripted a story set on the proposed site, then created two one minute videos for the competition. Combining three-dimensional models, live action footage, graphic elements and environmental sound, these videos were a dynamic elaboration of the standard architectural renderings and models.

Many of the architectural team were closely involved with us in all stages of the creation of the videos. Their design process and our own fed back into one another’s work, informing and enhancing the final submissions.

Against a strong field that included multinational developers and world-renowned architects, the second stage of the design competition was won by the Sydney team.

“The winning plan draws on an understanding of the site’s place in Sydney – its physicality, history, scale, program and potential – to propose an authentic new piece of the city.”

– Philip Thalis, Hill Thalis Architecture + Urban Projects.

Each website is built using a content management system. That means that to fill the site you fill out forms in a web browswer: copying and pasting the material into the appropriate place in the form. Images are also uploaded via the form, and a content filler needs to have an aesthetic eye because you may need to make decisions about where icons should be cropped or which part of an image is important. A comfortable understanding of Photoshop is really helpful.

We provide training and a place to work, or you can work from home. There’s a lot of variety in the job, so you’ll never be bored by the content. You’ll either be good at spelling, or good at using a spell-checker. And you’re probably a details person, so we’ll teach you how to encourage people to give you the details you need in the most useful way.

You’ll learn about project structure and being part of a web team.

Sounds like something you’d like to do? Email CONTACT FORM with a brief description of yourself and a 100 words about what you plan to do with your life in the next 2 years.

Since then we’ve continued to build websites, playful interfaces, Very Useful archives, web driven control interfaces and even art installations in the quest to communicate with humans and give them something to think about in a clever way. We even made an appliance: a machine to pretend you’re in outer space.

We often use and contribute to open source products. In the last few years the WordPress community has turned WordPress into the most incredibly flexible tool that allows anyone with content to plug in to so many beautiful graphical and mechanical interfaces.

House of Laudanum – clever and sensible digital work – we turn your wildest digital dreams into a reality.

Wade pulled together a small team to build a prototype semi-autonomous robot in a Victorian dress. Our job was to provide an interface between the web and the controller board. We installed a small webserver on an EeePC netbook. An Adobe Flash socket sent mouse clicks and speech instructions to a tiny Python server that interpreted whether the instructions should be forwarded to the controller board or handled by the EeePC. Speech commands were forwarded to the onboard Festival server using an MBROLA english male voice and then piped to the sound card.