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Nike Barcelona – Nike celebrates its 20 year partnership with F.C. Barcelona in a spot directed by Wally Pfister, a splashy ad by W+K. Via Adweek:

Nike celebrates its 20-year partnership with F.C. Barcelona, one of the world’s great soccer clubs, in a new 90-second spot directed by Oscar-winning cinematographer Wally Pfister that salutes team’s ability to unite Catalans across the city.

The ad, by Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam, is narrated in Catalan (with closed captions in English) by the actor Carles Francino (who was born in Barcelona). It features a unique visual look—the frame is divided into squares throughout much of the spot, which is a nod to the layout of the city, designed in the mid-19th century by urban planner Ildefons Cerdà.

It stars lots of current players, including Andrés Iniesta, Philippe Coutinho, Gerard Piqué, Sergio Busquets, Sergi Roberto, Ousmane Dembélé, Samuel Umtiti, Denis Suárez, Paulinho and Alexia Putellas. There are also cameos from Barcelona legends Carles Puyol, Ronaldinho, Pep Guardiola and the late Johan Cruyff.

Dutch forward Lieke Martens of the F.C. Barcelona women’s team—the reigning FIFA women’s player of the year—also has a key role.

Watch with subtitles. If F.C. Barcelona sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because it’s the club Lionel Messi plays for, one of the most famous players in the world.

The trailer for Season 3 of the Hugo Award-winning SFF series The Expanse is out! This looks like it takes place within late book 2. Via the Verge:

The Syfy channel has released the first full trailer for its upcoming third season of The Expanse, teasing a solar system on the verge of all-out war between Earth, Mars, and the residents of outer planets.

Last month, the channel released a brief teaser that revealed that the show would return in April, and hinted that the crew of the Rosinante will have to come to terms with their various past mistakes as war looms. This new trailer shows off a bit more of what to expect: the crew dealing with the knowledge that one of their own, Belter Naomi Nagata handing over a sample of an alien protomolecule to the leader of the Outer Planets Alliance. That protomolecule substance was used in the show’s first season to kill the entire population of an asteroid station, and later for a humanoid super-soldier that attacked a group of Martian Marines in season 2, enflaming tensions between the solar system’s various nations.

Those tensions look as though they’re going to spill over into violence next season. There’s some glimpses of some intense-looking space battles, the threat of a wider release of the protomolecule weapons, and a grim Captain Jim Holden saying that they “just declared war on Earth.” In the mix is the crew’s search for Mei Meng, a young girl who went missing on Ganymede who might be tied in with the program that created the protomolecule weapons. From the looks of things, the next season will finish up adapting the remainder of Caliban’s War, the second novel in the series.

Why do the Oscars love Method Actors? This Vox explainer looks into it. Some people (cough Jared Leto) do take it to extremes. Via Vox:

Method acting describes a broad framework for training actors to break down, understand, and portray their characters. The acting technique emphasizes tapping into one’s personal experiences to reproduce the emotions, actions, and behavior required for a dramatic performance.

But this approach remains controversial, because of the mental and emotional stress it can create in actors, and because of the extreme lengths some actors go to achieve it.

Although method acting was popularized by Lee Strasberg in the mid 20th century, it has its roots in early 20th century Russia. Konstantin Stanislavski, a Russian actor and drama theorist, and his peers at the Moscow Art Theater developed a “system” that method acting is directly based on. Stanislavski’s teachings emphasized critical, holistic analyses of scenes in tandem with self-reflection by the actor.

Stanislavski’s ideas spread throughout the US in the 1930s where they were interpreted and transformed by a subsequent generation of instructors, including Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner. These schools acting diverged, emphasizing and building upon different parts of Stanislavksi’s original system.

Strasberg’s interpretation emphasized drawing on personal experiences to relate to fictitious ones, Adler taught a greater focus on leveraging an actor’s imagination, and Meisner stressed the importance of inhabiting a scene truthfully, with less emphasis on abstraction and intellectualizing of the relationship between an actor and their character.

Icarus, a film about doping in sport that ballooned out into a documentary about Russian doping in Sochi, has won an Oscar for Best Documentary. Via the New York Times:

What started as a wild idea turned into something more dangerous in “Icarus,” a documentary that had the good fortune to be filming when bad news broke.

Bryan Fogel, the director and an amateur bike racer, planned to investigate the use of performance-enhancing drugs by taking them himself and then trying to evade detection. The idea, a sort of “Super Size Me” with steroids instead of Big Macs, brought him into contact with Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, who led Russia’s antidoping laboratory for Olympic athletes.

Early scenes show Mr. Fogel injecting himself (needle-phobics, beware) with substances, then charting his performance as he meets with specialists and makes video calls with Dr. Rodchenkov.

Months into the plan, Dr. Rodchenkov and Russia came under investigation for widespread doping at the Olympic Games. Mr. Fogel stops his own story and puts the focus entirely on Dr. Rodchenkov, who leaves Moscow for the United States. In interviews the doctor outlines Russia’s widespread steroid program and the clandestine steps taken to cover it up.

Those revelations were first made public months before the 2016 Olympics, when Dr. Rodchenkov’s detailed confession about state-sponsored cheating at the 2014 Sochi Games appeared in The New York Times. In fleeing Moscow, Dr. Rodchenkov feared Russian reprisals, and the anxiety shown here is palpable; the doctor was eventually put into protective custody by the American government.

Negative Space is an Oscar-nominated stop motion short film that’s played in more than 80 festivals and has won 25 prizes so far. Via Variety:

“Negative Space,” co-directed by Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata, is an adaptation of the poem by Ron Koertge. The poem’s tale about a boy who connects with his father by learning to pack a suitcase touched each of the filmmakers in different ways.

For Kuwahata, it was especially personal. “As an airline pilot, my father traveled often when I was growing up. I don’t really remember things like trips to the zoo or theme parks, but the image of him packing a crisp, white shirt is burned in my memory,” she recalls. “I remember my dad adjusting his watch precisely before leaving the house and I remember the packing list that he pinned to the wall of his study. My most vivid childhood memories are connected with objects, textures, and ordinary routines.”

The connection was less specifically tied to packing for Porter, but was no less significant. “The text spoke honestly to me about the way parents and children often ritualize connection,” he explains. “We’ve heard people refer to the father-son relationship in ‘Negative Space’ as cold or strange, and maybe it is by some standards, but that doesn’t negate the importance of the connection to the main character. ‘Negative Space’ made me consider my own relationships and the small things that represent a big part of those connections.”

Bloomberg created a video game to document and report on the demise of the American mall which is also a journey through mall management. Via Adweek:

“We thought, let’s just really push it hard and come up with zany and funny ideas,” said Bloomberg’s deputy editor of special projects Thomas Houston about the scenarios. Houston said after extensive internal testing, the team found “the tone was a little bit off, so a lot of the situations were pared back.”

Pared back, but often based on actual situations. That crawl-through artery used in the game was actually in a real mall. “Things were very much influenced by news stories we’ve seen before,” Houston said.

A team of Bloomberg reporters, editors, developers and the copy desk spent about three months building the game as part of a larger series on retail, including this data visualization called “The Death of Clothing.”

Houston said they thought about using real brands but decided instead to use names “evocative” of well-known retailers like Victoria’s Conspiracy, Pineapple Republic and Del Burrito.

Average gamers are playing about 4 minutes per session, though it’s topped one hour for some. And, for now, this is the only game in town for Bloomberg.com, but it is its most ambitious storytelling to date. (The site built The Trading Game, about picking stocks, two years ago.) The highest scorers are those who keep the mall open the longest, as of this writing more than 2,000 days.

The game can be played here.

KMart’s managing director Ian Bailey had more to say about the retail experience, via Inside Retail Weekly:

“We are failing to deliver on what customers really want,” Bailey told an audience at a Property Council of Australia business breakfast in Sydney. “They want more information from us, they want a super shopping experience, they want better products, and they want lower prices – pretty much they want the lot.”

ICYMI: The trailer for Fahrenheit 451 is out! This movie adaptation of the classic Bradbury book features Michael Shannon and Michael B Jordan. Via the Verge:

There’s no specific release date yet for HBO’s Fahrenheit 451, an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel about a future dystopia where books are illegal, and “firemen” are special operatives who find them and burn them. But the network has just released the first full trailer for the film. With Black Panther still setting box office records, the timing is just right: Fahrenheit 451 stars Michael B. Jordan, currently on-screen as Black Panther’s memorable, celebrated villain Erik Killmonger, and his role in the new film channels a similar mesmerizing ferocity and idealism. Jordan plays protagonist Guy Montag, a dedicated fireman who begins to have doubts about his profession, and about the government that has outlawed books as inherently dangerous because they preserve and communicate ideas.

Bradbury’s book is simultaneously caustic and melancholy. It’s a classic takedown of censorship and a gently frustrated prediction of a future where people are so absorbed into their entertainment that they don’t care about the world outside their screens. (Director Ramin Bahrani, of 99 Homes and Chop Shop, says he always regarded the book as “prophetic.”) But this trailer is all fire: the literal fire of books burning, obviously, but also the metaphorical fire of Guy’s initial fanaticism, and the self-righteous fury of his supervisor Captain Beatty, played by The Shape of Water villain Michael Shannon. There’s nothing melancholy or removed about this sneak peek, which suggests HBO’s film is going to be direct, angry, forceful, and just as politically charged as the original book. It’s set for release in May.

Vahana has taken its first test flight in Oregon! This is Airbus’ first air taxi. Is the future of hovercars already nearly here? Via the Verge:

Airbus conducted the first successful test flight of its Vahana electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft on January 31st, the aerospace giant announced. At 8:52AM, the full-scale vehicle reached a modest height of five meters (16 feet) before descending safely. The self-piloted flight only lasted 53 seconds, but it is a reminder that “flying taxi” mobility projects we hear a lot about these days, while sounding ludicrous, can’t be easily dismissed as vaporware.

Airbus has said it wants to build a fleet of autonomous, multirotor eVTOL aircraft that can be used to fly from rooftop to rooftop in dense cities where traffic is often at a standstill. The project launched in early 2016 as one of the first pursuits of A³ (pronounced “A cubed”), its Silicon Valley-based subsidiary. (Vahana is a Sanskrit word that refers to the vehicle or mount of a god.) Since then, the company has reported regular updates, including a concept video of the user experience.

VAHANA IS SANSKRIT FOR THE VEHICLE OR MOUNT OF A GOD
The full-scale demonstrator, dubbed Alpha One, was originally scheduled to take flight by the end of 2017. The vehicle was recently moved from California to a new flight test center in Pendleton, Oregon, where it conducted this week’s demonstration. A³ has said it plans to have a production-ready version by 2020. According to the company, Alpha One is 20.3 feet wide, 18.7 feet long, 9.2 feet tall, and weighs 1,642 pounds.

Ugly Delicious is Momofuku’s David Chang’s new Netflix series about food around the world, looking at their origins and their meaning. Via the New York Times:

David Chang and his new Netflix series, “Ugly Delicious,” can most easily be defined by what they’re not. Mr. Chang is not a fastidious French kitchen god, a high-energy American showman or an Anthony Bourdain-like poetic observer. “Ugly Delicious” is not a stand-and-stir cooking show or a pack-your-bags travelogue.

The show would, in some ways, look at home on the Food Network. Its eight episodes take on topics as conventional as pizza, barbecue, fried chicken and Chinese cooking. The cameras pan over jars of artisanal tomato sauce and capture the squirting juices of xiao long bao. Ritualistic pronouncements of deliciousness abound, often punctuated with a certain four-letter word, and the occasional non-culinary star — Aziz Ansari, Jimmy Kimmel — drops by to both lend and borrow celebrity wattage.

What Mr. Chang and the food writer Peter Meehan, his co-star and fellow executive producer, are attempting is something more ambitious, though: an extended television essay, in the form of free-associative, globe-trotting conversations about food and culture.

Since this is Mr. Chang we’re talking about, the conversations often take the form of arguments, and include a fair number of insults, which we’re to believe are good-natured.