This ten-foot tall cash register was designed and built by Larry Moss and Kelly Cheatle (pictured inside the register) with help from Bill McCormack, Smarty Pants and Barbara Levinson.

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that Kelly and I were building a cash register for the PMA Blur conference. I’m happy to say it was a huge success. The Promotion Marketing Association presents the Reggie Awards each year at this annual conference. The Reggies are given for promotional campaigns that were successful at the cash register. As far as I know, our register was the largest representation of the Reggie to date.  At ten feet tall, it was big enough for everyone at the conference to take turns posing for photos inside it. Thanks to all of the folks at PMA for the invitation to attend and install our piece, and a huge thank you to Donna Declemente for introducing us to the organization.

Pepsi Refresh Update

We appreciate all the support everyone gave in our effort to win a Pepsi Refresh grant. Looking at our web stats, our YouTube stats and just talking to so many of you, we’re truly convinced that we had more unique votes from individuals than almost all of the other projects. With 13,000 people viewing our video so far, we know we got attention and quite a bit of interest. According to the rules Pepsi established, we’d be automatically re-entered in the voting for the month of April, but we simply refuse to stretch this out any longer. We want to say “Thank you” to Pepsi for the opportunity.  We think it’s great that they’re offering money and supporting many worthwhile projects. However, it’s time for us to step aside and not annoy our supporters any longer with requests to vote.  There are much more productive things all of us can do with our time at this point and the last thing we want to do is harass people that are trying to help us out. Thanks for all of the votes.  We’ll go back to more traditional means of fundraising and will make sure that Elastic Park happens some day.

Mark Verge, Elastic Park's chief dinosaur designer, took first place in the large sculpture competition at Twist & Shout 2010 in Chicago with this life size spinosaurus.

Last month I sent out a note asking everyone to vote online so that Elastic Park could receive a Pepsi Refresh grant. Thanks so much to all of you that helped.  It almost worked.  We were pretty high up in the ranks for a while and ended in 22nd place. Out of 204 entries, that’s not too shabby. And we were high enough that our entry was automatically resubmitted for March. We were close enough, I know we can make the top ten this month to get this show on the road. I have to admit, I was ready to let the whole thing drop just a few hours ago when I learned we didn’t win in February.  But the huge number of votes so far today has already pushed us into the top ten.

The Pepsi voting site is set up to allow (encourage?) people to vote for their ten favorite projects on a daily basis. That means we need as many people as possible to vote every day. A number of people asked last month for daily reminders to go vote. We’ve set up a  mailing list for people that want that daily reminder. I will not send a reminder to my regular mailing list since I don’t want to annoy everyone.  If you want to vote for Elastic Park and would like a daily reminder, please write to me directly or visit the sign-up page. If, and only if, you sign up for it, you’ll get a reminder once a day that it’s time to vote.  We’ll keep you informed on where we’re standing and any interesting dino updates we can give you.

A special thanks to the Pioneer Balloon Company and Glue Dots for their support in getting this thing going. If there are any other businesses that would like to jump in and help us out, we’d greatly appreciate the support.

Vote for Elastic Park right now.

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Other recent stuff

I just returned last week from the annual balloon twisting convention, Twist & Shout.  This year it took place in Chicago and WGN was on site.  I got to talk a bit on the air about Elastic Park, but there was a much more amusing television moment than that.  Eleven entertainers woke up early in the morning to climb inside of balloons for the camera. Ten did it successfully.  Watch the clip and see for yourself the craziness in a hotel full of balloon artists, clowns, and magicians. (This isn’t actually the clip from WGN but from another camera that was running at the same time.)

Go to the WGN site and look for “Balloon Convention” to see the clip that aired.

Mini triceratops made with a few twisted Qualatex balloons and a few Glue Dots to help out.

Thanks to everyone that’s been helping us in trying to get a Pepsi Refresh grant. We’ve got a little over three more weeks to keep the votes going. It’s been fun to see so many people rally behind us. In fact, we have two big partners that I need to thank for all of their support, both in this campaign to get the grant and in the products that make these projects possible. Pioneer Balloon Company (Qualatex Balloons) and Glue Dots International. I’m excited to have both of them pushing for us. And to make things better, they’ve both announced new things that I’ll be using. I haven’t gotten any of the new Glue Dots Dot N’ Go dispensers yet, but I’ve been wanting a convenient dispenser for these things forever. Right now I’m just buying the big industrial boxes of dots. We use that many of them on the big projects that I suppose the industrial boxes aren’t a bad thing.  But something small to carry in my balloon bag will be nice. On the Qualatex front, my order of mocha and blush 321s just arrived.  Yeah!

We’re doing reasonably well on the campaign to get the grant, but still a bit behind where we need to be. Over 200 projects appear in our category and we’ve been holding our own, hovering just below the top ten.  Unfortunately, we need to be in the top ten at the end of the month.  With just a little more of a push, we can move up a couple of spots.

So thanks to the community that’s always been there for me.  All of the BalloonHQ members and guests have been doing an enormous amount of work in pushing this. Please, keep voting on a daily basis.

Of course, I realized yesterday how silly it was to just be calling people, tweeting and asking for votes when the whole point of this was to make an art project possible. The fact is, the phone calls, tweets and requests for support were stopping me from actually creating art. When that idea struck me, I forced myself to take a break from my desk and actually create something new. It’s small and fairly simple, and far from the 30-foot long version of this cretaceous creature that Elastic Park will show, but it is a dinosaur. I’ve spent so much time over the last few months on plans for the big exhibit, I never actually stopped to make any small dinosaurs.  So, here we are.  A cute little triceratops. A few heart balloons, a few twists, and I felt much more relaxed. I have to remember, I left my life as a programmer because art made me feel so free and relaxed. Gotta focus on doing more art.

Of course, always wanting to get things right, I finished this and then wondered if I picked the right color for my little triceratops. After all, there was just a paper published (well, at least one that I just read about) on dino colors. At long last, it seems that we have real scientific clues as to the coloring of  the prehistoric dinosaurs. I may have to do a little more research before some five-year-old points out my errant creation. At least I know most five-year-olds will take a little time to get up to speed on the new color information since most of them aren’t reading the New York Times. But who knows. They put some pretty cool things in the Weekly Reader these days and dinosaurs are always a hot topic among kids.  Maybe I don’t have much of a head start on them.

Don’t forget to vote daily for Elastic Park, the multi-thousand-square-foot dinosaur exhibition made entirely out of balloons.

Read more about Elastic Park.

Vote for us to get $50,000 in funding to launch this traveling show.

Pepsi recently announced their intent to give away over a million dollars a month for community projects.  The public will determine where the money goes. All you have to do is visit the Pepsi site to cast your vote. Each person is allowed to vote every day during the voting period (February 1-28, 2010). Please vote and spread the word. The more people we get to support the project, the better our chance of launching this national touring show.  After voting, please ask your friends to do the same.

If you missed it before, here’s the summary:

Elastic Park is an exhibit, featuring a unique blend of art, pre-history, and pop culture. The multi-thousand-square-foot, interactive exhibit (scalable to fit available space) was inspired by Michael Crichton’s popular novel, Jurassic Park.

Balloons are the medium used to create the exhibit. The unusual medium draws a very diverse crowd both for the construction phase and the display phase. This is important since all large scale Airigami creations are community-based art projects. Community members are invited to participate in the 100,000 balloon creation, working alongside an international crew of skilled artists.

Visitors will walk among the creatures of the Triassic through Cretaceous periods, as described in Crichton’s work. An audio tour with custom music and actor’s voices will guide everyone through, describing the creatures, the art, and telling the story.

Like all major Airigami projects, Elastic Park is about the community. It would be cool if it was just an artistic display.  But we’re taking it much further.  We’re inviting the public to take part in the construction as well. So once we get the funding, we’re going to be asking all of you to join in and help turn our plans into the most incredible dinosaur exhibition seen in the last 65 million years.

While things can certainly change, we expect the first stop on this tour to be Exploration Place in Wichita, KS. This is a fantastic science museum with just the right family-friendly atmosphere for us to work in.

Thanks for your help. We’re looking forward to, once again, populating the planet with pre-historic dinosaurs.

Instructions for voting: Visit http://www.refresheverything.com/ElasticPark. If you don’t see the “vote for this idea” button on the page, you may have to sign in. There’s a link on the bottom of the page to sign in or to register with the site.  When the page refreshes, there will be a big white “vote for this idea” bottom on the top right side of the page. (You shouldn’t have to jump through any extra hoops to vote.  You should be able to just see the vote button when you visit the page and then you should be able to just sign in when you click on it, but a number of people have reported that the site behaves very inconsistently.)