Blogbook

Kaiju Bunraku is a gorgeously shot, stylised short film by Lucas Leyva and Jillian Mayer told with puppets, the first Mothra film to make it to Sundance. Via Short of the Week:

An unauthorized indie Mothra movie told via Bunraku (traditional Japanese puppetry theatre), I can confidently say Lucas Leyva and Jillian Mayer’s Kaiju Bunraku will be unlike anything you’ve seen before. Looking to tell the story of one of the thousands of anonymous people you see fleeing the monsters in the Godzilla movies, this 13-min short started life as play before morphing into the distinct short it is today.

“My parents grew up in Cuba where it was very difficult, if not impossible, to consume American entertainment”, writer/director Leyva explains. “As a result, they grew up watching lots of Russian and Japanese media. When I got into dinosaurs as a kid, my dad shared his love of Godzilla with me. I wrote the first version of this as a play for a 24 hour theater festival in Miami (it got bad reviews). Years later, I wrote a full length semi-autobiographical Mothra film that takes place in the Cuban countryside and Miami. This short is the prologue.”

Though Kaiju Bunraku is undoubtedly an odd watch, it’s strangely relatable due to its central husband and wife characters. The film may be set in a land where giant monsters can destroy the life of a human with one powerful footstep, but the real drama comes from the conflict between this couple. And with Leyva revealing that with hindsight the film was a way of “working out some residual issues” from his break-up with Mayer, the short was obviously a personal and cathartic process for the filmmaking duo.

Doors are a metaphor in this powerful American political ad for MJ Hegar, who’s running for office as a Democrat in Texas. Via Adweek:

A former Air Force helicopter pilot, Hegar earned a Purple Heart after being injured during a combat search-and-rescue mission in Afghanistan, and the second woman ever to ever receive a Distinguished Flying Cross with Valor. Unable to return to flying, she went back home to Texas to work in business and start a family, before launching a lobbying campaign—and 2012 lawsuit—to end the ban on woman in ground combat positions in the military (The Pentagon overturned the policy in 2013).

That last mission, as the video describes it, led to Washington D.C. insiders—including the district’s Republican incumbent Rep. John Carter—slamming more than a few—you guessed it—doors in her face.

At first blush, the door references might seem like a slightly awkward metaphor pushed a little too far. But as the ad reveals more and more about Hegar—part of an historic wave of women candidates this year—they turn out be an effective motif, framing the powerful details of her life story, and helping tie the three-and-a-half minute ad together.

They’re also the conceptual thread that led Cayce McCabe—the writer, director, and producer at political consulting firm Putnam Partners who created the ad—to shoot the film on a steady cam (moving in and out of literal doors) to make the ad feel “very fluid” and “as though the whole spot is connected.”

“There’s no reason that political advertising needs to be particularly boring, or particularly straightforward, or what people have been used to seeing in political ads for decades,” says McCabe. “We can make ads that are as cinematic—as well-shot, well-produced, well-written, clever, attention-grabbing—as the big corporations’ ads.”

Adobe has created five Bauhaus fonts from typographic sketches and unpublished designs recovered from the legendary school of design. Via Adweek:

“Hidden Treasures: Bauhaus Dessau” is a series of five free font families that use as their starting point letter fragments and sketches by original members of the Bauhaus. Two of the font families—Xanti, named for Bauhaus designer Xanti Schawinsky, and Joost, for Joost Schmidt—can be downloaded starting today via Adobe Typekit. The rest, also linked directly to Bauhaus members, will be available in the coming months.

The fonts were developed by a team of international typographers and design students, led by renowned type designer Erik Spiekermann.

“The students at the Bauhaus were given exercises to draw letterforms, not to design typefaces. The tools did not exist to do so at a school in 1928,” he explains. “So we imagined what the students would have done had they had computers and type design software. The participants had all designed type before, so there was no risk of technical difficulties. They immediately understood both the challenge and the opportunity.”

As it did with its Munch brushes, Adobe will be issuing a set of “design challenges,” including a logo design, a business card, and a Behance project. The winner will receive a free trip to Dessau, Germany, home of the Bauhaus archives.

The Carters’ APESH**T is a single from their surprise album, Everything is Love. Filmed in the Louvre, it’s a gorgeous visual feast. A review via the Atlantic:

Throughout the video, Beyoncé and Jay-Z borrow inspiration from the strength and grace of women. In the now-iconic first glimpse of the couple, the camera glides toward them as they stand in front of the Mona Lisa, each wearing pastel-colored suits with no shirt underneath. The full-body shot calls attention to Beyoncé’s pants and Jay-Z’s elegant attire as the duo re-create the gaze of the woman in the painting. The other main artwork that orients “Apeshit” is a statue of a goddess, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, which appears to symbolize their success—as individuals and as a couple. At another point in the video, female dancers lying on the stairs beneath the duo resemble a foundation, lifting up the Carters’ “empire” with pulse-like movements. At times, the dancers’ formation calls to mind a spine.

In “Apeshit,” classical art helps define the Carters’ vision of how men and women relate to each other. The video subtly contrasts paintings of suffering in male-controlled societies, such as ancient Rome, with peaceful, present-day scenes of couples who are presumably equals. Perhaps the most striking work showing the toll of male violence is The Intervention of the Sabine Women by Jacques-Louis David. It depicts a group of women—who were kidnapped and raped by Roman soldiers in the eighth century B.C.E.—throwing themselves between their captors and the men of their home city in an effort to stop the war. The tableau, a political statement of its own, highlights the breakdown of order that can occur when women aren’t respected. Later in “Apeshit,” a painting of a crying woman clinging from below to a man in anguish (the two trapped in “hell” for adultery) is followed by a contemporary scene of a black man leaning his head peacefully on the chest of a woman as she holds him. When the two are kissing and caressing one another, they’re at eye level; neither is the more dominant.

Millennial monks are adapting to a modernising world by increasingly taking charge of their monasteries in order to save them. Via National Geographic:

This new generation of monks is coming of age after decades of Soviet religious persecution, which nearly wiped out the Buddhist monk population in the country. Roughly 17,000 monks were killed in Mongolia with the arrival of Communism in the 1930s. The number of monks in the country dropped from about 100,000 in 1924 to just 110 in 1990. More than 1,250 monasteries and temples were demolished.

Once communism ended, Buddhism—the country’s predominant faith—began making a comeback. But the religion still faces steep challenges due to generations of suppression.

The ornate and sprawling Amarbayasgalant monastery in the Selenge province in northern Mongolia is now home to 40 monks, who spend their time praying and studying Buddhist teachings. Still, the monastery had 800 monks living there before the Soviet era began.

Only 28 of the monastery’s 40 original buildings remain. In effort to preserve the historic site, UNESCO funded restoration projects there starting in the late 1980s.

Finding young people to pursue a monastic career in the modern world can be difficult, but the monks at Amarbayasgalant remain faithfully committed to ensuring that monasteries survive for future generations—so they keep teaching and inviting people to join them.

How TV gave us the perfect soccer ball: the ubiquitous black and white pattern was created in order for the ball to be seen more clearly on screen. Via Livestrong:

A soccer ball has 32 panels, 20 of which are hexagons and 12 of which are pentagons. The name of this shape is the buckyball, and it is named after the architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, who was trying to construct a building with minimum materials when he came across the shape. The official name of the shape is a spherical polyhedron, and it is perfectly spherical, making for a significant improvement on earlier soccer balls.

The Telstar
The soccer ball first got its famous black-and-white markings for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. According to the Adidas website, this ball was called the Telstar and was developed to help people see the ball more clearly while watching on television. Televisions in 1970 were mostly black and white, and a ball without markings could be difficult to identify.

Tradition
The Telstar became a tradition, with all World Cups until 2006 staying with the Telstar design. Other competitions, such as domestic leagues, also embraced the Telstar design for the same reason: so that viewers watching on black-and-white televisions could easily see the ball. The pattern, which features black pentagons and white hexagons, remains the same.

Modern Day
Today, color televisions are the norm, so there is no longer the need to give a soccer ball its Telstar colors. As the BBC website notes, the 2010 World Cup South Africa official ball was called the Jabulani. It carried original markings, was made of synthetic plastic and was designed with a completely different panel arrangement. The ball was intended to be technologically advanced, but many of the players and coaches complained that the ball was inferior to the Telstar.

Spell of the West is a beautiful short animated film by Sam Lane, about a cowgirl hunting down an elusive character damaging the environment. Via Short of the Week:

Despite the somewhat unconventional edge to its aesthetic and narrative, there are some recognisable tropes in Spell of the West that make it an accessible watch. Putting a Western tinge on an environmental storyline and throwing in a large dash of humour and weirdness along the way, Lane gets to deliver her message in a thoroughly enjoyable and approachable manner.

“Since I was a kid, I’ve had a very close connection to my natural surroundings”, explains Lane when discussing the aims of her film. “I’ve felt that over the years that most scientific work falls short of capturing the emotional aspect of human/nature relationships. In order to protect our natural surroundings it’s important to know the dry facts, but it’s also important to establish an emotional human connection. Narrative is a prime rhetorical tool, and I was interested in re-framing the environmental conversation with a deep respect and poetic appreciation for the natural world.”

Completing the film whilst in her third year of the Experimental Animation program at CalArts (even though the course doesn’t require their students to make a film in this year of the course), the design and animation of the piece was handled entirely by Lane. Employing Photoshop, Flash, After Effects and Premiere to craft her tale, the only assistance she had in completing Spell of the West was in the sound department – where she brought in a composer and voice-actors to put the finishing touches to her film.

Automata is a sci fi noir detective series which is now available online. Based on Penny Arcade’s story, set in Prohibition-era New York. Via Gizmodo:

The first episode of Automata, Van Alan’s free, five-part sci-fi series based on the Penny Arcade comic series of the same name, is now available online.

Grimm’s Basil Harris stars as Sam Regal, a toothpick-chewing private dick who’s basically a male Veronica Mars – catching dames breaking laws and hearts to collect a check from their unwitting husbands. After all, this is Prohibition times we’re talking about – vices are strictly forbidden. Only in this reality, it isn’t booze that’s the societal problem. It’s robots.

This is a world where automatons have become a regular part of everyday life, inspiring a moral panic that eventually led to a ban on all future production of these steel-faced androids. Remaining androids – such as Sam’s partner, Carl Swangee (Jones) – have become a lower servant caste, facing widespread discrimination as well as threats to their safety and well-being.

Automata was previously the focus of a successful 2015 Kickstarter campaign whose first trailer dropped in 2017. It looks true to the original webcomic created by Penny Arcade’s Mike Krahulik, which is a huge plus. Looking forward to the rest!

My Best Flaw is a campaign out of Brazil’s Papel & Caneta that talks about diversity in advertising, in for viewing right before Cannes. Via Adweek:

Every country has to do better in their efforts to elevate diversity in advertising—and the U.S. is certainly far from perfect. But Brazil has a particularly big problem when it comes to inclusion. That’s why one nonprofit creative collective is calling its nation out ahead of next week’s 2018 Cannes Lions Festival, when top marketers from around the world will be spotlighted in Cannes, France.

Describing itself as a nonprofit collective made up of global leaders and young people from creative agencies across the world “who are tired of waiting for change to happen,” Papel & Caneta (Paper & Pen) dropped this hauntingly beautiful video that, through poetic song and dance, reframes what Brazil considers “flaws” as just what its country’s agencies need to thrive.

In “Meu Melhor Defeito” (“My Best Flaw”), created by Brendo + Gonfiantini in partnership with production studio Paranoid, the nonprofit reimagines “problems” that might deter agencies from hiring Brazilian creatives as strengths. The spot, for example, urges ad folk to not hide the fact that they were raised in a ghetto or by a “bricklayer,” but embrace elements of their past, because what makes them different “makes a difference.”

In a statement, Papel & Caneta pointed out some disturbing facts about agency culture in Brazil. First of all, the nonprofit said 53 percent of the Brazilian population is black, yet they account for just 35 out of 1,000 agency employees across the 50 largest shops in the country. Papel & Caneta reported 90 percent of women and 76 percent of men in Sao Paulo’s communications market alone have suffered from some form of moral or sexual assault.