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London-based director Kibwe Tavares has unveiled a trailer for his upcoming short film Robot & Scarecrow and it looks pretty awesome! Via It’s Nice That:

London-based director Kibwe Tavares has unveiled a trailer for his upcoming short film Robot & Scarecrow, made for Michael Fassbender and Conor McCaughan’s production company DMC Film with co-producers Nexus, and social media network Vero. It has been funded through a partnership initiative founded by the companies to support emerging directors.

With Kibwe as director and Daniel Emmerson as producer with DMC, Robot & Scarecrow was filmed at UK festival Secret Garden Party, and features CGI by Factory Fifteen (which Kibwe co-founded). “Kibwe’s got a totally unique approach,” says Daniel, “and had an ambitious vision from the outset that involved animating pretty much every frame of the film. We got loads from the location and after that, it was a three-year process with a small team of super skilled animators and visual effects artists, who translated the live action performances.”

Kibwe explains: “I feel the story is a weird, but straightforward, love story! The classic tale of two characters unable to be together as one is free and the other completely controlled. It’s also more than that, and is a nod to our youth culture, specifically at festivals. I wanted to create something that celebrated our love of festivals.”

Robot & Scarecrow stars Jack O’Connell and Holliday Grainger, as Scarecrow and Robot respectively, and will be released on 31 May exclusively on Vero, as the first to come out of the companies’ partnership. Next will be Love Pool directed by Asim Chaudhry and John Moves by Ben Aston. The app will also act as a platform for other related content connected to the film, where users can explore the music, actors and concepts in more detail.

The nightmare returns as Netflix and the Jim Henson company prepare a 10 episode Dark Crystal prequel series… looking good! Via Rolling Stone:

Netflix and the Jim Henson Company are prepping a prequel series to Henson and Frank Oz’s 1982 fantasy classic, The Dark Crystal. The new series, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, will comprise 10 episodes and is scheduled to begin filming this fall. A release date has yet to be announced.

Age of Resistance will be set many years before The Dark Crystal, which chronicled the journey of Jen, a Gelfling, who’s tasked with repairing the Dark Crystal to prevent the evil Skeksis from ruling the planet Thra forever. In the new series, “three Gelfling discover the horrifying secret behind the Skeksis’ power [and] set out on an epic journey to ignite the fires of rebellion and save their world,” according to a press release

French filmmaker Louis Leterrier (Now You See Me, The Brothers Grimsby) will direct Age of Resistance, while Brian Froud and the Jim Henson Company will craft a new ensemble of fantastical creatures. Froud served as the conceptual designer on The Dark Crystal, as well as Henson’s 1986 film Labyrinth (starring David Bowie).

From the director of Snowpiercer comes this intriguing new Netflix-only film, Okja, about corporate waste, monsters, and other stories. Via the Guardian:

An Seo-hyun gives an outstanding performance as 13-year-old Mija, who has grown up with no parents, looked after by kindly grandpa Heebong, played by Byun Heebong (who was in The Host and also Bong’s 2003 film Memories of Murder). Her only friend and companion is Okja, the giant pig leased to them by flinty-hearted food tech CEO Lucy Mirando, played by Tilda Swinton. Okja’s ultimate destiny is to be taken away from them, poked and prodded by Mirando’s scientists, displayed to the media as an example of next-level meat production, paraded with the firm’s grotesque celebrity TV vet Dr Johnny Wilcox (Jake Gyllenhaal) and then finally eaten.

But poor Mija has grown up not quite grasping that, and soon Heebong will have to break it to her that Okja must go, and it’s going to be like leading Baloo away from Mowgli and sending him to the abattoir. But a crew of animal rights activists, led by the inscrutable Jay (Paul Dano), have other ideas.

Admittedly, Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance as the gurning Dr Wilcox is pretty broad and so is Swinton’s own performance at the very beginning. But her presence in the film deepens and intensifies as time goes on, showing us new perspectives of family anxiety and she is a marvellously watchable villain, wincing and scowling with self-pity and fear.

Old Spice wants you to help teach its robot kraken how to live life… Anyone else think this is quite likely going to end in tears? Via Adweek:

Want to spend 15 hours this weekend teaching a giant eight-tentacled robotic Kraken sea beast how to navigate the squishy steps from adolescence to adulthood?

Old Spice has a game for that.

It kicks off at 4 p.m. ET (1 p.m. PT) today at OldSpiceTwitch.com. The game, called S.Q.U.I.D (short for Shared Quests Uniting Individual Dudes), invites said dudes across the internet to help the giant mechanical cephalopod learn about school, work and romance, according to Wieden + Kennedy, which designed the game.

The game will be live from 4 p.m. until 9 p.m. ET on Friday, Satuday and Sunday. You and fellow dudes will “guide this mythical cephalopod through such rites of passage as driver’s ed, working at a pizza parlor, meeting the date’s parents and other manly life milestones,” the agency says.

The whole thing celebrates the launch of Old Spice’s latest manly scent, Krakengard.

Beyond that, we know very little, except that it will probably be more fun, and certainly more weird, than whatever else you had planned—or didn’t. We’ll circle back on Monday and see how it went.

Casillero del Diablo has the most elaborate ad campaign for a wine we’ve ever seen – titled the Wine Legend, set up to look like a film. We saw it this weekend in prerolls before John Wick and for a moment, almost thought it was a film with a really silly premise. Great series. For others in the set, see here. The award-winning campaign has gathered several awards:

The UK’s prestigious Harpers magazine celebrated our campaign in the “Engaging the Consumer” category in its Harpers Wine & Spirit Awards in recognition of its great quality and production.

Just a day after receiving this great news the international magazine The Drinks Business recognized Wine Legend in the “Best Consumer Campaign” category in its 2014 Drinks Business Awards.

“Our winning campaign was spearheaded by a film that brought a wine brand to the attention of a whole new audience, it managed to connect fantasy with reality. It’s sexy, exciting and what we want wine to be,” noted the jury of the event.

Added to these important achievements are two new awards from the international Oenovideo Festival in France. The jury voted our trailer-type film worthy of the “Prize for Creativity and Imagination” and another for “Best Film for a Promotional Campaign.”

“A lot of creativity. A brilliant idea for telling a story that has been repeated so many times for more than a century in a totally innovative way. The casting was well done. In less than two minutes we have suspense and emotion. We are riveted. What more could we want?” said one of the festival judges.

These important distinctions are added to other awards at the end of 2013. The first was from the Chilean Design Association, which named Wine Legend the winner of the Digital and Multimedia category.

Did you know? there’s a pattern behind colour names around the world in our languages, particularly in the first colours we choose to name. Via Vox:

In 1969, two Berkeley researchers, Paul Kay and Brent Berlin, published a book on a pretty groundbreaking idea: Every culture in history invented words for colors in the exact same order.

They reached their conclusion based on a simple color identification test, where 20 respondents identified 330 colored chips by name. If a language had six words, they were always black, white, red, green, yellow, and blue. If it had four terms, they were always black, white, red, and then either green or yellow. If it had only three, they were always black, white, and red, and so on.

The theory was revolutionary, and it shaped our understanding of how color terminologies emerge. But the idea comes with a few caveats, since all languages do not treat colors the same way grammatically as English does.

In the Yele language of Papua New Guinea, for example, their five “basic color words” only cover shades of red, white, and black. Those words are reduplications of words that reference objects — so mtyemtye (red) literally translates as “parrot-parrot.” But the language also includes a broad array of non-reduplicated words for things like ash, bananas, and the sky that are used to describe color. Those kinds of words aren’t always acknowledged as “basic color words,” but leaving them out ignores the true scope of the language.

ICYMI: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is coming out in August, and as Fifth Element fans, we are super excited. Via Polygon:

Created by writer Pierre Christin and artists Jean-Claude Mézières in the 1960s as a French serial, the comics went on to have a long life in both other languages and in graphic novel formats, which are typically referred to as albums. The series wrapped up in 2010.

But it was those early years, appearing in magazines, that first captured Besson’s attention as a child. Laureline, Besson once told me, was his first love. The idea of turning the comics into a movie seemed an impossibility, so he never really gave it thought until much more recently.

DeHaan, who takes on the role of Valerian in the film, wasn’t really familiar with the source material until the movie deal came up. He said he hadn’t read the comics before, but that he’s read them since.

“I think what’s cool about the comics in general is that they kind of lend themselves to infinite possibilities and worlds and all of that,” he said. “I think Luc kind of took one of the comics and made a lot more out of it. He’s expanded upon the comics more than like the comic itself. I think there’s a lot to play with there.”

DeHaan said that while Empire of a Thousand Planets, which serves loosely as the basis for the film, isn’t his favorite, he’d be hard pressed to say which of the 22 albums, 14 of which have been translated into English, are.

AlmapBBDO has a clever new campaign for Getty’s audio catalogue, splicing audio into a classic silent film, Nosferatu. Check it out! Via Adweek:

For its client Getty Images, the Brazilian agency has spent the last few years making in-depth, academic use of the company’s massive assets (most of us don’t even make it past the first page).

Its 2012 campaign, “From Love to Bingo,” used 873 Getty archive stills to tell the story of a single life in one minute. The “20 Years” print ads from 2015 illustrated how four celebs aged over time. And last year’s “Endless Possibilities” assembled four famous faces … using parts of the faces of other people, all from Getty’s own stock art.

This year’s campaign gives the approach a whole new spin. This time, it promotes a side of Getty Images many haven’t explored—its audio library.

The brand has a massive stock of music and sound effects for sale. To bring it to life, AlmapBBDO set its creatives on a whole new adventure: Taking the 1922 classic silent film Nosferatu and giving it fresh auditory life in a campaign called “Not Silent Film.”

The new sound was composed of thousands of Getty audio files over thousands of hours. The iconic vampire, who’s been a fixture of our millennial dreams ever since that one Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode, even gets his own language and voice. (Dusty and horrifying, not unlike unearthing a cursed Pharaonic tomb while your mentor plunders all the glinting—and obviously evil—booty for “science.”)

The Fraktur bag for IKEA has become so viral, there’s now even a workout that involves it, thanks to Reebok trainer Andrew Connor. Via People:

People have managed to turn the iconic IKEA Frakta bag into boots, wallets and even crop tops, and now Reebok trainer Andrew Connor is demonstrating how they can be exercise tools as well.

Just grab a few Frakta bags, and a medicine ball or weights — and you can work up a serious sweat.

Some workouts include:

1. Plastic Bag Press: Add weights (or any heavy object) to two bags to do this move. With bags in hand, rest the weight on your shoulders with both palms facing inward toward your head. Press straight up until both arms are fully extended with bags in hand. Lower arms back down toward your shoulders, slightly bending your knees as your hands reach your shoulders. Use the momentum to drive back up into a fully extended arm position.

2. Plastic Bag Rows: For this you’ll need a pull-up bar. Swing the bag over the bar so both handles hang from either side. With arms outstretched, grab both handles and pull yourself up until your chest reaches your hands. Extend arms to lower yourself back down.

In this Monoprix ad campaign called Label of Love, a boy pursues a girl in a 4 minute cinematic film using… packaging labels? Via DesignTaxi:

It seems that romance somehow regularly blossoms from French supermarkets. Not long ago, Intermaché launched a funny, amorous ad that demonstrated how far a guy would go to win a girl’s heart through healthier food choices.

Now, French grocer Monoprix champions a boy’s romantic pursuit in its new saccharine film Label of Love. The ad is a part of its campaign, launched in partnership with agency Rosapark, to celebrate Monoprix’s 85 years. The cinematic four-minute film, directed by British duo Thirtytwo, was inspired by the supermarket’s witty and iconic product packaging.

“For years, the retailer’s generic products have gained attention for their creative packaging—in big, block letters set against a mono-color background, each product’s name is given through a play on words,” explained Rosapark in a press release.

The spot builds on these puns to tell the tale of a boy’s romantic pursuit, but that’s not all—come 22 May, Monoprix will be releasing additional, alternative conclusions to the story.

We all know that packaging plays a key part in selling a product. In many ways it’s your company’s ad on a shelf. Interested in more creative ideas like Monoprix? Give us a call.