Blogbook
Raku Kichizaemon is a short film about the head of the Raku family on his art and his family’s 450 year tradition as ceramics craftsmen. Via Nippon.com:
The black Raku tea bowl made by Chōjirō, the first-generation head of the Raku potter family, seems totally undecorated, lacking gaudy color or elegance of form. Made in the late sixteenth century, this piece was commissioned by none other than Sen no Rikyū, the father of the “way of tea.” The creator fashioned the bowl so it would nestle in the palms of the drinker’s hands, as if he or she were holding still-malleable clay. Hidden within the tranquil appearance of this smallish tea bowl are the deep spirits of both Chōjirō and Rikyū, for whom the philosophy of wabi-cha—the simple, austere, frugal tea ceremony that came to be in the flamboyant Momoyama period (1568–1603)—was as important as his own life.
In our own era, Raku Kichizaemon XV, the current head of the Raku family, has launched an unprecedented plan: to take these aesthetic bowls—created with techniques transmitted only from father to son, from the first generation of the Raku family all the way to the upcoming sixteenth generation—and exhibit them outside of Japan, in places not familiar with the tea ceremony culture. Exhibitions in Italy, France, and the Netherlands in 1997 were followed by another exhibition of approximately 170 works in the Los Angeles County Museum in the United States in 2015, as well as exhibitions at the Hermitage Museum and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Russia’s two biggest art museums. Around 190,000 people visited the exhibitions. The Raku tea bowls, embodying the classical Japanese aesthetic concepts of wabi and sabi, transience and imperfection, were enthusiastically received during their tour. This in turn made a great impression on the Raku family.
Patrick Moreau—founder of Muse Storytelling—has narrowed down the top five mistakes in storytelling that he’s seen around the globe. Via Muse Storytelling:
Over the years, I’ve been fortunate enough to conduct workshops in countries across the world. Regardless of where I find myself, there is one thing that they all have in common.
As soon as the workshop is done for the day, there’s at least a handful of people who have a clip pulled up on their phone or laptop and are hoping to get some 1-on-1 feedback.
Making time is the easy part. The challenge is finding a new way to say the same thing over and over again. You quickly start to notice that there is a pattern in the feedback. I’ve long wanted to put together a list of the most common mistake we’ve seen from filmmakers across the globe (and we’ve certainly made all of these many times over as well).
You can read the full writeup above, but to summarise:
1. Mistake 1: Too Many Characters
2. No Defined Purpose or Objective
3. Poor or Non-Existent Story Structure
4. Little or No Conflict
5. Style over Substance
Which one is your pet peeve? Ours is probably #5… though we do love our artsy films.
Watch robot artists in a robot classroom draw surprisingly beautiful portraits of people as part of artist Patrick Tresset’s latest exhibition. Via Wired:
In a specially-designed classroom near Southwark station in London, 20 robot students are hard at work. They chat to each other in a language inspired by morse code before their robot teacher settles them down and starts to take the register. Once all robots are accounted for, the day’s lessons begin; the robots dutifully learn to count by drawing straight lines and tally marks in their notebooks.
The robot classroom is part of artist Patrick Tresset’s latest exhibition, Machine Studies. Tresset’s robots consist of a camera and a robot arm holding a pen, controlled by a laptop hidden in each robot’s “body” – a traditional school desk. In Human Study #4, the robot class completes a range of activities partly inspired by Tresset’s own schooldays in France.
While the robot students’ actions are synchronised, each is unique in its movements. Tresset has programmed the robots to express different behavioural traits, like nervousness or shyness. Some of the robots appear to take to their task with vigour while others work slower and seem apprehensive. Tresset is interested in how we humanise robots; his work, he says, is more about human nature than technology.
Raised by Krump is a great short film about one of the world’s most interesting and energetic dance movements – and how it affected its dancers. Via Short of the Week:
In an era where full-frame DSLR’s are a dime a dozen and every kid with a half-baked script seems to be renting out an Alexa, it’s easier than ever to find a pretty image online. As curators, this is challenging—not too long ago whether you knew how to shoot a film was actually a fairly accurate measure for if your film itself was any good. Not so anymore, and the ease and cost of producing lovely footage has kind of cheapened its impact—if everything looks great, then nothing is special anymore.
As I too often do, this introduction is a meandering attempt to define a film by contrast—acknowledging my preconceived notions only to explain why they have been blown away. True to form, I raise the issue of the ubiquity of beautiful imagery in video and film to draw special attention to Raised by Krump and how it absolutely stands out from the crowd as utterly delightful to look at through its image quality, color grade and the ecstatic motion it captures.
Krump is an energetic and evocative dance form originating out of L.A. in the early 90’s, and this film serves as a loose documentary surveying its history through the lives and experience of individual dancers. It provides an intimate peek into the subculture and into the hearts of some of the style’s practitioners, whom speak of it almost as a form of religious practice—so deep is the spiritual release they experience.
Motel 6’s ad campaign has won best radio ad of the year again at the Radio Mercury Awards. Check it out, listen, and enjoy! You can also listen to the other finalists here.
Title: 2017 Motel 6 Radio Campaign
Client: Motel 6
Agency: The Richards Group
Writers: Rachel Dawer, Steve Grimes
Producers: Katie Snyder, Sheri Cartwright
Creative Director: Chris Smith
Engineer: Glenn Ferguson
Production Company: Post-Op
Talent: Tom Bodett
Via Adweek:
Among long-running advertising campaigns, few are as charming as Motel 6’s radio work featuring Tom Bodett as the folksy voice who promises that the motel will “leave the light on for ya.”
The campaign—which BBDO’s Robin Fitzgerald picks as one of her three favorites in our new “Best Ads Ever” video, above—has been running for a staggering 31 years. It was way back in 1986 that David Fowler, a creative director at The Richards Group in Dallas, heard Bodett talking on NPR’s All Things Considered (he had a gig as a humorist on the show, while making a living building houses in Alaska) and signed him up for the Motel 6 campaign.
The rest is history. “I didn’t expect to be doing it 17 months later,” Bodett told Adweek in 2003, when the campaign was 17 years old. “I think everyone will know when it’s over, but it never seems to be over.”
It still isn’t. And in fact, the latest execution shows how far it’s come and yet how little it’s changed—in it, Bodett riffs about millennials, yet the structure remains basically the same as it’s ever been.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls4n99pVi10
Haven’t gotten enough of IKEA’s iconic blue Frakta bag? Here’s IKEA’s loving tribute to its humble carry bag, beautifully filmed. Via Adweek:
Ikea’s iconic blue 99-cent plastic Frakta bag has been in the news lately thanks to fashion house Balenciaga, which made a $2,145 leather version of it. But actually, Ikea was planning on tooting the Frakta’s horn this year anyway—on the occasion of its 30th birthday.
The Frakta can carry almost anything, including, from Ikea’s point of view, a certain metaphoric significance. As an object of utility, it’s perhaps the clearest and most stripped-down example of Ikea’s philosophy of “democratic design”—the merging of form, function, sustainability, quality and low price (as the brand explained it to Adweek last week).
Ikea calls it “the most hardworking bag in the world,” and the recent move to package instructions with it—showing how to cut it into other products—only extends its utility.
“It’s been talked about, made into dog-ponchos, used as a fashion accessory and for exercising—and we think that’s great,” Ikea says. “But the truth is, this plain piece of plastic has an even bigger meaning than that. It summarizes everything we believe in—that design, function, and quality shouldn’t be just for a few.”
This is summed up nicely in the happy-birthday ad for the Frakta below, created by Ikea Creative Hub and agency Acne, which tells us the spot was in the works since February, long months before the Balenciaga news broke.
How dead is the Great Barrier Reef? This explainer from Vox is about coral bleaching, the No. 1 threat to coral reefs around the world. Apparently it can no longer be saved, only maintained. Via Vox:
It’s official. The Great Barrier Reef cannot be saved.
The prognosis comes from the Australian government’s Reef 2050 advisory committee, made up of experts and scientists responsible for managing the reef’s future.
In the more optimistic times of 2015, the committee put out a report on how to best preserve the reef. But now two of the committee’s experts have told the Guardian that the plan is no longer feasible “due to the dramatic impacts of climate change.”
Instead, they recommend that the goal be revised to “maintain the ecological function” of the Great Barrier Reef. And the reef may now have a better shot of being listed as a “World Heritage site in danger,” a designation the Australian government has fought for for years.
One reason for the bleaker forecast for the reef is the record ocean temperatures for the second year in a row that produced mass bleaching along the reef, leaving almost half of the coral dead.
The latest aerial surveys released by scientists in April show a recent bleaching event almost as severe as the record bleaching of 2016 that left two-thirds of the reef damaged. Bleaching occurs when extreme heat forces algae to abandon coral, turning them pale white.
The world’s most eligible bachelor is literally the last of his kind–a Northern White Rhino under guard in Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy. Via Adweek:
Meet the “World’s Most Eligible Bachelor.” He’s 43 years old, has a 90,000-acre home and military-trained security. His name is Sudan.
He’s the last male Northern White Rhino in existence.
Alongside Ogilvy Africa and in partnership with Ogilvy North America, Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy has put Sudan on Tinder, in a campaign that spans 190 countries and 40 languages. (The wider you spread the net, the more likely you’ll be to find love, right?)
Sudan can’t mate naturally. To help him successfully breed with Southern White Rhino surrogates, the conservancy needs funding for research into artificial reproductive techniques, like IVF, for rhinos.
When single ladies (or dudes) swipe right on Sudan—whom some publications cringingly call a “horny” bachelor—they can donate to his cause through a link sent in Tinder’s messaging function.
Ogilvy’s goal was to skirt the overbearing tone of typical conservation campaigns while finding a fun, new way to use social platforms. While this is hardly the first use of Tinder in a marketing capacity, it may well be among the most worthy.
Plus, if Sudan actually doesn’t find love, we may never see another like him ever again. While “You’ll never find another like me!” isn’t much more imaginative than rehashing Aziz Ansari’s inspired “Whole Foods” line, our rhino has an advantage over other bachelors: It’s simply the truth.
Agent 327 is a brilliant animated short film feature pitch by the ever innovative Blender Institute, taking on the spy genre. Via Short of the week:
CG in the short film space feels like it has been getting weirder and more idiosyncratic these last couple of years. As tools have become more accessible to independent creators, individuality and a diversity of styles have flourished. Agent 237 thus feels like a charming throwback to the recent past, when animation schools were routinely graduating tradesfolk prepared to join the ranks at Pixar, Disney, or Dreamworks. It is a slick, action-comedy with a bright and conventional aesthetic that happens to be impeccably executed. If you miss the days when French schools were pumping out charmingly broad slapstick work like Oktapodi several times a year, you’ll get a kick out of this short, 4min piece.
Agent 237 is a product of the Blender Institute. Blender, a free, open source 3D software suite, has been one of the leading causes of the democratization of animation tools, and has developed a fiercely dedicated community around it—over the last several years it has routinely produced memorable crowdsourced short films that show off the product’s capabilities via titles such as Big Buck Bunny, Tears of Steel, and Sintel.
As part of its latest innovative tourism marketing campaign, Sweden has listed itself–the entire country–on AirBnB. Via Adweek:
At nearly 173,000 square miles, the country of Sweden is a little bit bigger than your average apartment or mountain house.
But true innovation knows no physical or virtual boundaries, and the official tourism group Visit Sweden proved that point this week by listing the entirety of Scandinavia’s largest country on Airbnb.
Curious globe-trotters with a penchant for fresh air can explore everything from the Smygehuk Headland at Sweden’s southern tip to the northernmost monuments of Three-Country Cairn, where Sweden meets its Norwegian and Finnish neighbors.
This brilliant campaign by Forsman & Bodenfors, the formerly independent Gothenburg agency behind Volvo’s “Epic Split” campaign that was acquired by MDC Partners last year, wouldn’t really work without the freedom to roam.
Allemansrätt, which roughly translates to “the right of public access,” is an established part of Sweden’s constitution allowing both locals and visitors to access any land (with the obvious exception of private residences) within a certain distance of a “dwelling house” or farm plot.
“This right enables the Swedish people to experience nature and enjoy the beautiful Swedish wildlife,” said Visit Sweden U.S. manager Jenny Kaiser. “In Sweden, we have everything from high mountains to deep forests, from beautiful archipelagos to quiet meadows. Now, together with Airbnb, we welcome everyone to come to Sweden and, through freedom to roam, share our wonderful nature.”