Blogbook
Ryan Coogler, the director of Black Panther, breaks down the casino fight scene in the film, showing the amount of detail that went into its design. Via Slashfilm:
In a video for Vanity Fair, director Ryan Coogler breaks down the minutiae of the scene, including everything from the colors of T’Challa, Nakia, and Okoye’s outfits, to that iconic wig-throwing moment.
The Black Panther casino fight scene is a dynamic and sleek riff on James Bond movies — a franchise that director Coogler cited as a heavy inspiration for Black Panther — as well as a sly homage to the movie’s pan-African roots.
One of my favorite things about this scene is the confident camera movement from the first to second floor midway through the fight scene — showcasing the action in one long take. It’s a technique that Coogler has used before in Fruitvale Station and Creed, and he goes into fascinating detail about how hard it was to pull off here. “It took several takes,” Coogler says. “What we had to do is we had to float a camera up with a cable rig.There’s no green screen here, it’s all happening live and direct.”
There are some other really cool factoids, like the purposeful reflection of the colors of the Pan-African flag in the trio’s red, green, and black outfits, as well as the distinction between their different fighting styles. Pay attention especially when Coogler goes into the fighting style of Okoye — the true star of this scene. So much research has gone into creating a full portrait of Okoye and the Dora Milaje, and most of it goes unsaid in the movie. It’s incredibly fun to see Coogler reveal those details like the giddy fanboy he is.
The critically acclaimed game Papers Please now has a short film that captures the aesthetic and mood of the game’s totalitarian regime. Via Polygon:
The YouTube version of this Russian-language film offers subtitles in 22 languages, which is an artful statement itself. Several of them are nations formerly of the Eastern Bloc, whose cold, bureaucratic governments are the basis for “Arstotzka,” the fictitious nation for whom the protagonist, an immigration inspector, works.
It’s only 10 minutes long so it’s practically impossible to give an overview that does not reveal the conclusion or its major plot points. Papers, Please the film is, however, like its namesake, unforgiving and nihilist in tone, both making a larger statement about what these kinds of regimes expected of people, what it did to them, and what the consequences were.
Papers, Please should need no introduction, but still: It’s Lucas Pope’s award-winning independent game from 2013, in which the player must evaluate the documents and pleas of those crossing a divided city held by two ideologically hostile nations, somewhat like Berlin from 1945 to 1990. The system is designed to present players with the moral dilemma of doing one’s job correctly or showing compassion, often when presented with a compelling verbal plea that conflicts with someone’s documents.
Duck, Death, and the Tulip is a beautifully made, minimal, short animation about a duck who finds that death has been following it for its entire life. Via Short of the week:
Based on Wolf Erlbruch’s picture book of the same name, Jorge Sandoval and Ella Yoon’s stellar, tranquil animation feels like if Ingmar Bergman had made a children’s film—it’s a poetic, philosophical story about death and friendship, told through the non-traditional lens of a storybook world. It’s a film filled with allegory and symbolism, but beyond the intellectual nourishment it offers, it’s also a surprisingly heartwarming take on loss, life, and inevitability. You know, typical kid’s stuff…
Death is so often attributed both in cinema and literature as a malevolent force—a scythe-wielding agent of horror. But, here, he is a beacon of non-traditional comfort, intimate and warm. The act of death and loss is a hard thing to really grasp. There’s is sadness to it, to be sure, but also a reassurance in its inevitability. Death will come for all of us, so this film, in a sense, is asking one to embrace that fact—to befriend the notion. And, so in this story, a companionship forms between our titular heroes—partners in life, and, well, death.
Even though it’s a few years old, the film’s ultra-wide aspect ratio makes me itch to see this animation on the big screen. Unfortunately, being shown online doesn’t do really do it justice. Still, we’re excited to finally getting around to featuring it.
Netflix’s Rotten is a set of true crime documentaries about Big Food that will make you rethink how you look at the food you eat. Via the Atlantic:
If Netflix’s Chef’s Table is a delectable exercise in the art of haute cuisine food porn, Rotten, its newest docuseries, is more of an appetite suppressant. Over six episodes, the show tackles a variety of afflictions blighting the food industry, from a glut of diluted Chinese honey undercutting American beekeepers to mafiosi-like power grabs in New England fisheries. Rotten’s scope is wide, and its message is often hard to discern. (Raw milk, the subject of one episode, is portrayed as both the potential savior of a dying industry and a kind of snake oil that can literally be poisonous.) But the overarching takeaway from the series is that the business of food is sprawling, labyrinthine, and woefully corrupt, and that the consequences affect far more than what ends up on people’s plates.
It’s an argument that was made more gracefully and with less narrative ADHD by Robert Kenner’s 2009 documentary Food Inc., which delved into the environmental and ethical costs of industrial farming and agribusiness (Food Inc. is also available to watch on Netflix). Rotten—produced by Zero Point Zero, the company behind Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown—is less focused, which means it wastes almost an entire episode documenting how a British man died because there were traces of peanut in his chicken tikka masala. What it does do, though, is branch out from critiquing the usual suspects of Tyson Foods and Monsanto. No food is immune, the show argues, to the nefarious reach of corporations, from garlic to monkfish to almonds.
If you are a medico, read this and get ready for unemployment. You might even want to cancel your new Maserati.
Medical Doctors are no doubt one of the most vulnerable professions during the rise of the robots.
All your usual diagnostic methods, like temperature, heart, blood checks, eye and skin observations, all could be better done by a robot. They can drill down to a micro level and they can do it long distance, meaning the robot doesn’t even need to be in the same country.
Your analysis methods, whether by website or peer comment, could be done much more quickly and more efficiently by a robot. What’s gut feel? It’s unscientific, plain phooey and you know it.
Your available hours and your systems of quick meetings with patients, many per hour, could be done better by robot. And a hell of a lot cheaper.
Robots would happily do house calls. They’d probably love to get out of the office, oh, I forgot, they don’t care. They don’t need a ‘lifestyle’.
Robots would be far less likely to be swayed by personal issues when prescribing drugs or other services. And does a chemist really care who writes the prescription, as long as it’s right for the patient?
Instead of seven or more years, and millions of dollars, a robot would cost almost zero to educate – you just download the update program in seconds, and bingo, another doctor!
Robots don’t need/want to make several hundred thousand dollars a year so their kids can go to a private school and take holidays skiing in Canada. Robots don’t need to drive Mercedes cars or Teslas, they might just propel themselves. Did you see that problem Serena Williams had with getting proper medical care during childbirth? Robots wouldn’t be subject to institutionalized biases. They wouldn’t be rude to salespeople either. Maybe they’d even mitigate or solve the global opioid crisis.
Robots may not do very well in a soft, caring sense now, cause, they don’t actually care, but how many of us have felt the Doctor’s ‘sympathy’ was just a well-practiced, fake, ‘bed side manner’? And besides, I heard they’ve been working on giving robots a personality. Hell, there’s a robot out there right now called Sophia who’d just been given full citizenship in Saudi Arabia.
And you know what Ms Doctor, while you think you’ll be rescued for some years by the power of an AMA or your capacity to lobby your local government member, think again. You personally have little sympathy for people who’ve been ripping you of for years and giving you shit service, like supermarkets, getting rolled over by the likes of Amazon. That’s how we feel about doctors. We just want a more efficient, less costly system. We don’t care what you think about it.
So it’s not like you’ll have any control – we’ll just go where the service is better and the costs are lower. We humans will do what we have always done. We will vote with our feet.
About the author – Geoffrey McDonald Bowll is a market researcher and advertising executive with over 30 years experience in managing behavior change and brand growth. He has successfully run creative agencies, served on several medical boards and advised government, service and pharmaceutical suppliers at the most senior level in Australia, US and UK. See GeoffreyMcDonaldBowll on LinkedIn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0j_CX1S2es
Megaforce and W+K have come up with a gorgeous new ad for Nike, celebrating London, Londoners, and the diversity and energy of the city. Via Adweek:
Some Nike commercials are as memorable for their camerawork, and the way they’re shot, as for their celebrity stars or message of inspiration.
Guy Ritchie’s stunning 2008 spot “Take It to the Next Level” immediately comes to mind. A decade later, the brand’s newest effort from Wieden + Kennedy London, titled “Nothing Beats a Londoner,” is likewise technically breathtaking, in part thanks to the efforts of Riff Raff directors Megaforce.
W+K has described the three-minute spot, which rolled out last Friday, as being “from London, for London.” But it wouldn’t have been the same without the four Frenchmen who make up Megaforce, whose long career in music videos has included work for Rihanna and Madonna.
The ad takes the viewer on a tour of the British capital. It celebrates the spirit and competitiveness of real-life Londoners by featuring 258 of them, including famous faces from music and sports like Mo Farah, Harry Kane, Dina Asher-Smith, Gareth Southgate and Skepta.
The spot weaves together a slew of different scenes by having a character from each one slip seamlessly into another, over and over. The talent narrates by talking directly to the camera, and each scene features different types of camera moves and tricks—some of them as wild as anything Nike has put on film. Furthering the playful sense of competition, even the music changes for each scene, offering everything “from a classical score to grime to a wurlitzer organ,” says W+K.
Guns Found Here is a 10 minute documentary on the ATF’s National Tracing Centre, which, like much of the USA’s guns system, is broken. But the men and women in there try to make it work. Via GQ:
There’s no telling how many guns we have in America—and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated. On purpose. Thing is, the geniuses who work there are quietly inventing ways to do the impossible.
[…]
Anytime a cop in any jurisdiction in America wants to connect a gun to its owner, the request for help ends up here, at the National Tracing Center, in a low, flat, boring building that belies its past as an IRS facility, just off state highway 9 in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in the eastern panhandle of the state, a town of some 17,000 people, a Walmart, a JCPenney, and various dollar stores sucking the life out of a quaint redbrick downtown. On any given day, agents here are running about 1,500 traces; they do about 370,000 a year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XtCnGT0B20
Black Panther has set records for its opening weekend. Here’s a close look at its score with Ludwig Göransson, who has worked with Coogler on all his films. Via Variety:
Ludwig Göransson, the Swedish-born composer who was charged with scoring Marvel’s “Black Panther” movie and has worked with director Ryan Coogler on all of his films, didn’t just visit a university library or look at YouTube videos: He spent a month in Africa.
The result was life-changing, he tells Variety: “I came back with a totally different idea of music, a different knowledge. The music that I discovered was so unique and special. [The challenge was] how do I use that as the foundation of the entire score, but with an orchestra and modern production techniques — infuse it in a way that it doesn’t lose its African authenticity?”
Coogler says his composer (who also scored “Fruitvale Station” and “Creed”) returned from his sojourn with “amazing” material. “We were really interested in getting African sounds that had never been in a film like this,” he notes.
Nearly all of the unusual sounds in the “Black Panther” score were recorded in the West African nation of Senegal, where Göransson spent two and a half weeks accompanying singer-guitarist Baaba Maal on tour. Maal introduced Göransson to other Senegalese musicians, and many performed on the soundtrack.
The music that pairs with T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), monarch of the film’s fictional African kingdom Wakanda, is led by six “talking drums,” which Göransson explains as “a small drum you put on your shoulder, one that does what no other percussion instrument does — it breathes.” The drummer squeezes, then loosens it to change the pitch.
Maal sings (in the Fula language) about the death of T’Challa’s father; he collaborated with Göransson on the song, heard when Wakanda is first revealed in the film. For the theme associated with usurper Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), the composer used another West African instrument, the Fula flute: “It sounded sad but also aggressive, energetic and impulsive,” he says, and with the flutist speaking and even screaming into the flute, “it really resonated with the character.”
Diesel bootlegs itself with this pop up store in NYC’s Chinatown. Little did passers-by know that “DEISEL” was a Diesel brand-strengthening exercise. Via Vogue:
“HANDBAG, handbag, watches, watches.” Down in New York’s Chinatown, sales assistants operate from behind concealed doors and the trunks of cars, plying their luxury knock-offs to fashion fans who want that latest four-figure It bag without the prohibitive price tag. As of today, however, there’s a new sales tactic on the block: Diesel has opened a pop-up store of products based on bootleg designs called ‘DEISEL – For Successfull Living’ [sic].
The pop-up, which is decked out like any other traditional hole-in-the-wall, fake-as-they-come shop space on Canal Street, is part of Diesel’s spring/summer 2018 campaign strategy, Go With The Flaw. Stock comprises a series of denim, sweatshirts, caps and T-shirts, all printed with the misspelt Diesel logo, and is priced at knock-off sums. According to Renzo Rosso, the president of OTB group, which owns Diesel, the venture is aimed at “encouraging fans to feel free to wear whatever they want.”
Being authentically fake is an interesting idea. Bootlegs have historically been viewed as A Bad Thing for fashion, eating into profits and damaging the inherent value of a brand, with the caveat that they will also possibly harm the customer who – wittingly or unwittingly – buys them (those fake Prada sunglasses? No UV protection. And watch out for Cobalt-60, a radioactive isotrope, found in counterfeit metal bag straps). But in recent seasons brands have been keen to embrace the bootleg, with Vetements and Gucci both selling “fake” collections of designs based on counterfeits popular in Korea for the former, and in the Eighties streets of New York for the latter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-pifW8aECw
Geico has had a great run of funny pre-roll ads that really make use of the time constraints to get their message out in a hilarious way. The latest set, also by the Martin Agency, is about Geico interrupting its own ads. Via Adweek:
The earlier “Unskippable,” “Fast Forward” and “Crushed” campaigns tried to give the viewer a better preroll experience. “Interrupt-a-palooza” does, too—but in a way that amplifies the normally most annoying aspect of the form. You still have to sit through the 15 seconds, but at least you get a bit of subversive, meta comedy along the way.
“In the previous three rounds of pre-roll work, we played with the concept of time. First by skipping to the end, then fast-forwarding through the middle, and last year, condensing our ads,” says creative director Neel Williams. “This year, we took a different approach, but still kept things very self-aware. Rather than apologize for the interruption, we thought it would be fun to lean into it.”
“Getting interrupted before watching an online video is not exactly a Ferris wheel ride,” adds associate creative director Mauricio Mazzariol. “So, these new Interrupt-a-palooza ads are supposed to bring some humor to the issue by embracing the disruptive nature of pre-roll and taking it to a whole new level.”