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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UW-VgxlIZI

Nike is on a roll with this great Caster Semenya ad, following so closely after the release of the Colin Kaepernick campaign. Nice to see Nike supporting so-called controversial athletes like Caster and Colin. If you haven’t been following what happened to Caster, check out this Guardian article:

The story of the South African runner Caster Semenya embodies these tensions perhaps more than any other. The multiple world and Olympic 800m champion has been the subject of insults, medically invasive procedures and hysteria since she first competed on the international stage. She has also been claimed as a national hero, an icon, South Africa’s version of Serena Williams.

Semenya’s story divided women in sport too. Sometimes uncomfortably so. Italy’s 800m runner Elisa Cusma Piccione cruelly labelled her “a man” after Semenya was diagnosed with hyperandrogenism, a medical condition characterised by elevated levels of testosterone. One of Great Britain’s national runners, Lynsey Sharp, decreed Semenya’s presence in the sport “unfair”, while marathon world-record holder Paula Radcliffe said, “When we talk about it in terms of fully expecting no other result than Caster Semenya to win that 800m, then it’s no longer sport.” Disturbingly, the female voices of dissent are overwhelmingly white. In contrast, those women most affected by athletics’ stance on what constitutes a female athlete are women of colour from the global south.

Queer Lisboa International film festival’s 22nd year’s TV spot celebrates Portugal’s LGBTQ+ community with this joyful Pride Moms spot. Via Best Ads on TV:

Queer Lisboa is one of the most respected LGBT film festival in Europe. And this year the festival has a new campaign named “Pride Moms”. According to Marcelo Lourenço and Pedro Bexiga, the creative team responsible for the campaign – “Nothing is more important for those who assume their homosexuality than having the support of the family – especially their mothers. That’s why this year we would like the campaign to be a tribute to these “pride moms” that support their gay children. More than simple advertising, we would like the campaign to be an instrument to combat prejudice and promote inclusion. ”

In the TV spot we have a choir of real mothers with their gay children singing the famous song by Joe Cocker “You are so beautiful”. Directed by Fred Oliveira (Krypton) the music was conducted by the Portuguese maestro Pedro Macedo Camacho.

The campaign also has print ads and outdoors with famous Portuguese drag queens and their mothers, with a different kind of invitation: on Sunday 16th, whoever takes their mother to Queer Lisboa does not pay the tickets . Marcelo Lourenço and Pedro Bexiga have been the creative team behind the Queer Lisboa multi awarded campaigns since 2010.

Blood types are a 20 million year mystery — why are there so many of them? Do you know your own blood type? It’s possible that you don’t. Via the Verge:

Do you know your blood type? If you haven’t been in any medical situations where blood type is important, you might not. I certainly don’t, even though I’ve been fascinated with blood since I was a sophomore in high school.

That year, I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. That meant, among many things, that I had to make myself bleed nearly every day as I monitored my blood sugar levels through a finger prick. (I now wear a monitor with an under-skin sensor that continuously checks my blood sugar, saving my fingers from so many pricks.) So when that same year, I learned how to use microscopes in science class, curiosity got the best of me: I took some of my blood and placed it under the microscope. The choreography of red and white blood cells dancing around the slide left me in awe.

But as common as blood is, there’s a lot that we still don’t know about it. We know there are eight main blood groups that make up a majority of the world’s population and dozens of rare types as well. But it turns out that scientists still don’t know why we evolved different blood types.

In the video above, we go over some of the early theories surrounding blood that date back to 200 CE. I also take a test, called the Eldoncard, to figure out my blood type. But as much as I can learn about my own blood, we may never know how or why all the blood types evolved as far back as 20 million years ago. That’s frustrating — but also incredibly fascinating.

Marla Coppolino is the Snail Wrangler in this National Geographic short film showcase about an illustrator’s efforts to save the land snail. Via the Cornell Chronicle:

By day, Marla Coppolino seeks companies to license and commercialize Cornell’s life sciences technologies for the Cornell Center for Technology Enterprise and Commercialization.

But by night, she is one of only a handful of snail experts in the country and North America’s only “snail wrangler” who professionally manages snails for film and photography. Earlier this month she was featured on the Discovery Channel in Canada. She is also a research associate for two scientific institutions with various research projects underway and a budding entrepreneur who will soon have a line of snail products (T-shirts, iPhone covers, wall hangings).

[…]

On her four-acre Groton farm, Coppolino also cares for a donkey, three ducks, three guinea fowls, a cat and parakeet and more than 50 land snails.

“I have loved snails ever since I was 7 and discovered land snails in our suburban New Jersey backyard,” says the petite malacologist (mollusk expert). Watch Coppolino’s segment on The Big Q program on the Discovery Channel Canada at http://www.discovery.ca/dp/videos/?clipid=1042428. Coppolino is 4 minutes and 24 seconds into the clip.

After working at the American Museum of Natural History as a collections manager, overseeing 117,000 lots of mollusks with some 1 million specimens, Coppolino earned a master’s in zoology with a focus on the diversity and abundance of snails in ecosystems. She’s been part of various research projects as a research associate at Ithaca’s Paleontological Research Institution and at the Delaware Museum of Natural History.

These gun control PSAs show how arming teachers in classrooms is a bad idea — following the American national debate post-Parkland. Via Adweek:

President Trump felt the wrath of gun control advocates earlier this year when he suggested that teachers carry guns during school to prevent mass shootings. Just days after a gunman killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine’s Day, the president said an armed teacher would have “shot the hell” out of the attacker, thereby preventing disaster.

A group using the hashtag #VoteEmOut is now rallying against the president’s comments via a series of dark and satirical PSAs that show what it might look like if teachers actually came to school armed.

In one film, a shot is accidentally fired in the teacher’s lounge after a standoff over a plate of complimentary blueberry muffins. In another, a teacher uses his gun to intimidate a bully in the hallway. Then he and a colleague reminisce about how all they could do in the past was just send kids to the principal’s office—before complimenting another teacher about his new Glock. A third spot sees a teacher go back and forth with a student on a math problem. She’s not a great educator, but we soon learn why she was hired anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOmZXG19Ets&feature=youtu.be

John Lewis and Partners have partnered with Waitrose and Partners (whew, what a long title) with this cute Bohemian Rhapsody brand philosophy ad. Via Fast Company:

No, it’s not Christmas, but John Lewis decided to add another epic ad to its marketing schedule. But much like the retailer’s holiday work, this one leans heavy on adorable kids and aims right for our collective feels. There are no cute animals–like, say, a penguin or a dog or a bear and a hare–but the wee ones are putting on a killer cover of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” with impeccable production design for a grade school concert.

Created by agency adam&eveDDB, it promotes the company’s “partnership” business model, which includes sibling brand Waitrose, that gives employees a stake in the company.

The tie-in to teamwork feels tenuous, but by the time you get to the second verse you won’t really care. Beyond the usual online and TV, the spot will also be running in theatres ahead of the upcoming 20th Century Fox film, Bohemian Rhapsody.

It’s not the first time the brand and agency have paired cute kids with a hit song. Back in 2015, it was one little girl doing an epic dance routine around the house to Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.”

The making of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfJFi4NpDhY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq2CvmgoO7I

Colin Kaepernick has partnered with Nike in the ad campaign heard around the world — in Dream Crazy via Wieden + Kennedy. The video ad was released a day after Colin shared the now-viral print image on his twitter:

Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. #JustDoIt pic.twitter.com/SRWkMIDdaO

— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) September 3, 2018

Via the Washington Post:

Colin Kaepernick has been a lightning rod for controversy ever since he made his decision to bring attention to police brutality two seasons ago when, as the starting quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, he began taking a knee during the national anthem. So it came as no surprise that when Nike recently unveiled it’s new “Dream Crazy” campaign, passionate reactions from consumers across the globe took hold.

Responses to the ads sparked debate about whether Nike had bitten off more than it could chew when the company decided to make its relationship with Kaepernick public — or whether it had simply made a good business decision.

But a report from Edison Trends, a top advertising research firm, shows that Nike’s new commercial could be good for business. According to the report, following a brief decline, the shoe giant’s online sales grew 31 percent which was substantially better than 2017’s 17 percent increase during that same time period.

“There was speculation that the Nike/Kaepernick campaign would lead to a drop in sales, but our data over the last week does not support that theory,” Hetal Pandya, co-founder of Edison Trends, told Marketwatch.com.

Nike’s campaign, which celebrates the 30th anniversary of Nike’s iconic “Just Do It” mantra, includes an ad comprised of a black and white photo of Colin Kaepernick, with the words: “Believe In something. Even if it means sacrificing everything,” as well as a 90-second commercial featuring video clips of well-known athletes such as LeBron James and Serena Williams, accompanied by a voice-over and appearance from Kaepernick himself.

“Dream Crazy” has been watched more than 16 million times on YouTube and has garnered nearly 15,000 comments on the site.

The ongoing debate and engagement (both controversial and not) shows how important it is for modern brands to get involved with social issues.

Following the runaway success of the film Crazy Rich Asians, the author of the book, Kevin Kwan, and Harper’s Bazaar take a look at “real” Crazy Rich Asians. Via Harper’s Bazaar:

When my first novel, Crazy Rich Asians, was published in 2013, many readers were astonished to learn that in Asia there were women who dressed in couture from morning till night. They were particularly captivated by the character of Astrid, the beautiful heiress from Singapore who was always immaculately attired in the latest couture looks. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been asked whether women like Astrid truly exist, but I would always answer that, as a child in the late 1970s, I personally knew women who took the Concorde from Singapore to Paris via London twice a year for their couture fittings and that Queen Sirikit of Thailand had been partial to Balmain since 1960. I have pictures of my grandmother from the 1920s and ’30s in avant-garde dresses that looked like they could have come from the House of Worth or Lucien Lelong. She would never say if they were couture, but I do recall her telling me, “All my clothes and shoes came from Paris.”

The people at Wisecrack have made a great video about the cinematography in the Shining, showing how it increases the creepiness of the film. This has been discussed before elsewhere, including by Matt Burns Media Production:

The Shining uses symmetry and verticals throughout the film with the long hallways and endless amounts of ceiling lights perhaps symbolising a long journey with no end? The use of bold primary colours is startling with red, blue and yellow being the most frequent. Does the colour red reflect passion? Or just blood? The colour Red is used so stubbornly with Red carpet, Red walls, the Red tuxedo of the bar tender, Red jacket (Jack), Red clothes (Danny and Wendy) and of course RED RUM, written in Red crayon. By using primary colours to this extent it provides consistency within the cinematography but is also very symbolic. The other way that Kubrick uses colour and light to emphasise emotion is the pale blue over exposed colours that are used to convey cold expression or feeling and to provide a sense of cold blood and to grab the audience. I am referring to the close-up of Nicholson staring out over the snow-covered garden through the window with the evil grin on his face.

The long sweeping dolly shots of massive empty rooms and corridors again gives a sense of isolation and abandonment. These smooth tracking shots in silence or with eerie music creates extreme tension and quite often a fear of the unknown. There is always a feeling of regret for Danny as he turns down a different empty corridor alone on his tricycle. This is again emphasised by the use of POV shots where the director has put the audience in the boots of the character and lets the audience experience the feeling of roaming around this haunted empty hotel alone. The close-up shots on the terrified faces of Danny and Wendy are very reminiscent of shots from ‘A Clockwork Orange’. The light plays so magnificently on Nicholson’s eyebrows and pointy nose and at time makes you think fatherly? or evil?