Blogbook
Japanese cosmetics company Shiseido has a bright and colourful new campaign by Wieden and Kennedy Tokyo for its WASO product line. Via Adweek:
The strategy behind the work involves pitching this new line to young, digitally-focused consumers more likely to be swayed by the arresting visuals. A gradual product rollout effort began earlier this summer with WASO’s official Instagram page and a website targeted to young Japanese consumers.
“Our target audience–millennials–don’t believe in a singular definition of beauty. And neither do we,” the brand statement reads. “We believe that no matter who you are, if you’re true to yourself, you are beautiful, simply because you come from nature. We have launched WASO by creating a campaign which reminds our audience of this and in doing so celebrates their individuality and confidence.”
Beyond the films above, the full campaign also includes a series of “on the road” films and a group of striking, high fashion-style images representing different elements in the WASO equation, as shot by Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen.
The digital photos pair modern clothing and hairstyles with a collection of particularly striking landscapes to achieve maximum visual contrast. The colors of the models’ clothing and surroundings also correspond to the elements represented: bright orange carrots, golden honeycomb, bluish mushroom, the varied greens of the loquat tree and the more neutral “tofu” tones.
FP7 Beirut helped create this incredible music video for Mashrou’ Leila’s Roman, celebrating feminism in the modern Arab world. Via Adweek:
Lebanese alternative rock band Mashrou’ Leila’s vision of the Middle East today is an amalgam of varied and sometimes contradictory influences, from the historical to the political.
“Worms sculpt my body now/ The earth cradles my skin/ Why’d you sell me to the Romans?”
So sings lead vocalist Hamed Sinno in his group’s latest single “Roman,” named for the doomed empire that ruled the area from 64 B.C. to 646 A.D.
The song’s video, which was co-produced by the Beirut-area outpost of McCann Worldwide’s FP7 network, plays with and reinterprets stereotypes of Arabic and Muslim cultures. According to a release about the project, the band, whose name translates to “Leila’s Project” or “Overnight Project,” aims to illustrate “how struggle and conflict can be used as a starting place for progress” by using traditionally dressed Arab and Muslim women to “purposefully celebrate Middle Eastern feminism.”
It’s the closing weekend for MIFF2017 – the Melbourne International Film Festival! Last chance to catch some of the best films of the year. Some of our highlights for the weekend:
Wonderstruck (trailer above) Review via Variety:
“Wonderstruck” is a supple and flowing experience by comparison. Haynes, working from a script by Selznick, guides and serves the material with supreme craftsmanship. For a while, he casts a spell. Yet one of the film’s noteworthy qualities is that it creates a nearly dizzying sense of anticipation, and the payoff, regrettably, doesn’t live up to it. “Wonderstruck,” with its tale of two lost and impaired children finding each other across time, will certainly be an awards contender, and it may gently push the buttons of more than a few moviegoers, but it’s an ambitious doohickey impersonating a work of art.
Jungle (Review via Hollywood Reporter):
More than a decade after premiering Wolf Creek in Melbourne, director Greg McLean has returned to the festival that made his name with Jungle. Based on the memoir by Yossi Ghinsberg, an Israeli man who got himself lost in the Bolivian jungle in 1981, the new film apes the structure of McLean’s horror breakout almost exactly, with three backpackers whose hedonism is rudely interrupted — this time by red ants and rapids instead of an Outback serial killer.
I Am Not Your Negro (Review via the New York Times):
A few weeks ago, in reaction to something we had written about blackness and whiteness in recent movies, my colleague Manohla Dargis and I received a note from a reader. “Since when is everything about race?” he wanted to know. Perhaps it was a rhetorical question.
A flippant — though by no means inaccurate — answer would have been 1619. But a more constructive response might have been to recommend Raoul Peck’s life-altering new documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro.” Let me do so now, for that reader (if he’s still interested) and for everybody else, too. Whatever you think about the past and future of what used to be called “race relations” — white supremacy and the resistance to it, in plainer English — this movie will make you think again, and may even change your mind. Though its principal figure, the novelist, playwright and essayist James Baldwin, is a man who has been dead for nearly 30 years, you would be hard-pressed to find a movie that speaks to the present moment with greater clarity and force, insisting on uncomfortable truths and drawing stark lessons from the shadows of history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkdsGeJxDcA
Adidas’ latest segment in its “Original is Never Finished” series is a dystopian sci-fi ad that includes stars like Kendall Jenner. Via DesignTaxi:
Kendall Jenner joins the adidas Originals ‘ORIGINAL is never finished’ campaign, which has previously starred names like Snoop Dogg, Desiigner, and Young Thug.
This third video for the series moves to the beat of Frank Sinatra’s classic song I Did It My Way, at the same weighty, gritty pace as the first two installments. It features a flashing, glitchy mash-up of dystopian sci-fi and Renaissance art, with Kendall Jenner and other models aligned to Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and Sandro Boticelli’s Birth of Venus.
The motivations behind such visual alignments are clear—Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man symbolizes a perfectly symmetrical, balanced human body and also reflects the artist’s excellence across the fields of arts, science, mathematics and architecture. It’s no surprise that Adidas would seek to associate its high performance apparel with the best creative who’s achieved accomplishments across numerous subjects.
Their Snoop Dogg and Stormzy spot previously took out a Grand Prix at Cannes in Entertainment for Music. This grand visual statement was created by Originals global lead agency Johannes Leonardo, this series is the launch campaign for Adidas Originals.
Epic Fail is a highly creative, avant-garde essay of a short film that questions how we perceive truth, information and politics. Via Short of the Week:
Imagining a world where nothing short of “World Peace” is up for an online vote, Barth envisions this watershed moment as it is digitally experienced by a young man on his laptop, and how, similarly to events of the past year, certainty in “correct” outcomes end up thwarted. Biting, if simplistic observations abound, regarding media preoccupations with horse-race analysis, attention-economy tactics, and the debilitating nature of multi-tasking in information-rich environs. Eventually, our subject forgets to vote while in pursuit of self-serving gratification in the form of click-bait spam that promises “5000 Followers”.
Barth’s analysis is not solution-driven, nor does it highlight unexamined issues, but it is interesting in how concisely he and his co-writer Joe Hampson are able to bundle varying threads in the five minute film: the epistemological threat of social media filter bubbles, the rise of fake news, and a media culture that speaks endlessly about millenials, without really engaging them. Perhaps the self-absorption of our protagonist feels like an easy shot, but we cannot refute the fact that our generation, considered the most politically-conscious of the past several decades, is routinely under-represented in elections.
In discussing his motivations with us, Barth describes the 7 month process of creating the film as a way of “evacuating” his feelings post-election. It is an interesting phrase, and ties into his citation of Sartre’s debut novel Nausea as his inspiration. Antoine Roquentin, the protagonist of the novel, overcome by a pervasive sickening feeling, obsessively documents every fleeting observation within and outside of himself in an attempt to determine the cause of his discomfort. The result is a confrontation between existence and perception.
Coca-Cola: A Bottle Love Story is Coca-Cola’s latest ad, a stop motion oddball animation made out of recycled plastic bottles. Via Adweek:
The tale borders on nonsensical. The bubbly dialogue, packed with puns about intrinsically mundane inanimate objects “bottling it” (British for chickening out) and getting “trolleyed” (drunk) together, is painfully cutesy, and strains under the weight of its own ridiculous metaphor. But the production itself—a stop motion featuring characters, props and a set all meticulously crafted from recycled plastic bottles—is nifty enough to carry the whole thing.
A making-of video is arguably more engaging than the ad itself, featuring execs from Coke and Ogilvy Berlin. Watching the production team cut up bottles and shape them into components from the ad is fun, even despite the usual dose of self-congratulatory glee. And the company’s claim that it’s planning to increase the amount of recycled plastic in its bottles to 50 percent (by 2020) adds the illusion, at least, of substance to the message.
That should probably be taken with a grain of sugar, though. It was an increase from a prior commitment of 40 percent, and made amid pressure from environmental activists, who are still not satisfied—which may speak to why the brand is hitting this message at this time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmKRSl_6UNI
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power is now showing in Melbourne with limited screenings across Cinema Nova and other places. Check it out! Via the NYTimes:
In a summer movie landscape with Spider-Man, a simian army waging further battle for the planet and Charlize Theron as a sexy Cold War-era superspy, it says something that one of the most compelling characters is Al Gore.
“An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” a follow-up to “An Inconvenient Truth,” Davis Guggenheim’s Oscar-winning documentary from 2006, is a reboot that justifies its existence — and not just because Mr. Gore has fresh news to report on climate change since his previous multimedia presentation played in multiplexes.
Now gray-haired and at times sounding angrier in his speeches, Mr. Gore, in “Sequel,” takes on the air of a Shakespearean figure, a man long cast out of power by what he casually refers to as “the Supreme Court decision” (meaning Bush v. Gore) but still making the same arguments that have been hallmarks of his career.
If there is a thesis in this new documentary, directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk (“Audrie & Daisy”), it’s that a rise in extreme weather is making the impact of climate change harder to deny. The movie touches on Hurricane Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, the wildfire in Fort McMurray, Canada, and the Zika virus. Mr. Gore visits Greenland and the flooded streets of the Miami area. (He acknowledges a complicated relationship with Florida.)
ICYMI: There’s a Hokusai exhibition in Melbourne, featuring prints from his most famous series, including the Great Wave off Kanagawa piece. Unless you’ve been living under a rock all this while, you’ve probably seen a reproduction before somewhere. Now’s your chance to see two of the prints in person! Via the NGV:
Katsushika Hokusai is regarded as one of the most influential and creative minds in the history of Japanese art. His unique social observations, innovative approach to design and mastery of the brush made him famous in Edo-period Japan and globally recognised within a decade of his death.
The self-described ‘Old man mad about drawing’ was known by at least thirty names during his lifetime and was renowned for his unconventional behaviour. Despite his fame, Hokusai never attained financial success and his years of greatest artistic production were spent in poverty. He travelled and moved his resting place and studio regularly, finding inspiration for his unique style through close observations of nature and interactions with ordinary people.
In 1909 the NGV purchased five works from Hokusai’s iconic Thirty-six Views of Mt Fuji series, including his most celebrated image The great wave off Kanagawa (The great wave), 1830–34; two works from his A Tour to the Waterfalls in Various Provinces series; and four other major works. These astute acquisitions established a legacy of Japanese art in Australia that has now extended for more than one hundred years.
Check out this delicious “baked” animation for the Great British Bake-off by 4Creative. Beautifully made, and it’s making us hungry! Via Design Taxi:
Who doesn’t love a good bake? In this fresh-out-of-the-oven trailer for the upcoming season of The Great British Bake Off, agency 4Creative dedicates the one-minute spot to the show’s delicious subject in an all-singing, all-dancing, stop-frame animation.
The video was filmed in-camera, directed by Parabella and produced by Blinkink. Bakers and animators joined forces to bring to life a cast comprising 335 baked characters, from biscuits to loaves, that sing along to Paul McCartney and the Frog Chorus’ We All Stand Together.
“We knew we wanted to ‘bake’ an animation and take people to a warm and comforting place while blowing their eyeballs off their faces,” Mikey Please, co-founder of Parabella, explained to It’s Nice That. “It’s a challenging dichotomy. The show’s about wholesome, ordinary moments and we wanted to conjure that feeling, but also bring something new and fun and Channel 4-ish… Once we settled on the Frog song, a lot of ideas fell into place, celebrating Britain and togetherness, and the unifying force of baking.”
“Pretty much everything you see on camera is edible. That we used real cake, icing and bread, lent the film a crusty authenticity. It also meant that stuff crumbled, sunk in the oven, went too soggy, went too hard. Turns out bake-mation is similar to stop motion animation in that it’s riddled with little hiccups that become central to the final piece.”
KFC’s Real Colonel Sanders returns in ads that combine old footage with new footage made to look old, resulting in a charming campaign. Via Adweek:
“We’ve had some amazing celebrity Colonels over the past two years, and each of them has put their own twist on our original Colonel Harland Sanders,” said George Felix, the company’s U.S. director of advertising. “But no one can play the Colonel like the Colonel can play the Colonel. Unfortunately, our original Colonel stopped making ads in the 1970s, so we utilized technology to bring him into the 21st century to sell modern-day offers like our $5 Fill Up and $10 Chicken Share himself.”
The man may be old, but the bucket is new.
Credits
Agency: Wieden+Kennedy Portland
Client: KFC
Campaign: “The Original Colonel’s Original Recipe”
Creative Directors: Jason Kreher, Freddie Powell
Copywriter: Heather Ryder
Art Director: Devin Gillespie
Producer: Nicole Kaptur
Account Team: Jesse Johnson, Rob Archibald, Lindsay Varquez
Executive Creative Directors: Jason Bagley, Eric Baldwin
Production Company: Smith + Jones Films
Director: Ulf Johansson
Executive Producer: Philippa Smith
Line Producer: Justine Madero
Director of Photography: Alwin Kuchler
Editorial Company: Joint
Editor: Steve Sprinkel
Post Producer: Chris Girard
Post Executive Producer: Jen Milano
VFX Company: Method Studios
VFX Supervisor: James Rogers
Senior Flame Artist: Ian Holland
VFX Producer: Jennie Burnett
Music and Sound Company: Walker
Mix Company: Lime
Mixer: Sam Casas
Producer: Susie Boyajan