Blogbook
Hijabi by Mona Haydar is a rap video aimed at countering Islamophobia and the discrimination that Muslim women face in their lives. Via Konbini:
Mona Haydar is 28 years old. She lives in the United States, but her parents were born in Syria. As the daughter of immigrants, she often feels like she doesn’t truly belong anywhere. She’s criticized from both sides, never really finding her place.
Living in a western country means being surrounded by a culture that threatens the traditions she was taught as a young child by parents who wanted to preserve their history and pass it on at any cost. This is Mona Haydar’s story, but also the story of countless immigrants.
[…]
In the song, Mona talks about the discrimination Muslim women deal with on a daily basis and the feelings that result from those experiences. It’s not easy to be a Muslim women wearing a hijab in western society today.
As her husband explained in an interview with Fusion, he didn’t really understand Islamophobia until he married Mona. Sometimes people stop her in the street and stare at her, asking things like: “What’s your hair like? I bet it’s really nice. Doesn’t that veil make you sweat? Isn’t it too tight?”
Tired of having to answer questions like that, Mona, who is 8-months pregnant, turned her frustration into a rap, coupling English lyrics with Middle Eastern rhythm and instrumentation, proudly singing: “Wrap my hijab/Keep swaggin my hijabis.”
The video is 100% feminine, proving it’s possible to be modern, stylish and creative, and wear a hijab at the same time.
JWT’s program School for Justice aims to turn former underage child prostitutes into lawyers, by equipping them with a targeted education. Via Adweek:
In recent years, underage sex trafficking has run rampant in India, with as many as 1.2 million children—some as young as 7—forced to serve as prostitutes. Yet, only a handful of cases leading to convictions are ever brought to trial. (That number was 55 in 2015, the most recent year for which statistics are available.)
J. Walter Thompson Amsterdam believes education will help solve the problem, but raising public awareness is just one element of an initiative the agency rolled out this week with social rights organization Free a Girl Movement.
Dubbed “School for Justice,” the program seeks to make a real-world impact by educating some of the young women who previously worked in brothels, providing them with training geared toward a career in law. Nineteen former underage sex workers between the ages of 19 and 26 began their studies this week. JWT hopes that one day they may become prosecutors, or even judges, empowered to combat the criminals who once exploited and abused them.
“The client came to us with a brief for an awareness campaign for child prostitution in India, aimed at Indian men,” JWT Amsterdam executive creative director Bas Korsten tells Adweek. “After a few concept rounds, the creative team came up with the idea for School for Justice. We presented it, and Free a Girl liked it, although they were aware of the huge implications this approach would have. In close collaboration with them, we worked out the educational program, looked for a physical space, selected the first class of girls, and built the campaign around it.”
HBO’s latest campaign is a riff off its famous static opener, getting an impressive range of stars (including Game of Thrones) into the bag. Via AdAge:
According to Chris Spadaccini, exec VP-consumer marketing at HBO, the decision to debut the campaign now was not sparked by increasing fray of original content from streaming services like Amazon and Netflix. Rather, the effort bows just as HBO is gaining more momentum from its hit “Big Little Lies,” and ahead of what promises to be a robust spring and summer season. Its aim is to honor its own subscribers but also to catch the eye of newcomers.
“We challenged the agency to find a way to tap into our subscribers’ emotional connection to our brand, but in a fun, unexpected way using our family of talent,” he said. “How can we tap into that feeling of anticipation and excitement our viewer has before entering our world — that feeling that is best captured by the iconic static that opens our programming? Mekanism came up with a cool idea of how we could bring that static to life.”
“We thought of this literally and figuratively as a harmony of all those characters — that’s what the chord represents,” said Mekanism Creative Director David Horowitz. “It’s the voice of the channel. The reason you anticipate something great is that collective identity. You’re so used to seeing that [opener] before a great moment that when you see it before a new show, you’re already expecting something of a certain caliber.”
This gun control PSA by the Illinois Council against Handgun Violence argues that children’s toys would be less regulated if they were guns. Via Adweek:
Everyone knows that teddy bears aren’t as dangerous as firearms. But these classic toys have to satisfy a wide range of safety standards before they make their way into a store, much less a child’s hands. Guns, on the other hand, face few such requirements.
That’s the premise behind a new ad created by FCB Chicago for the nonprofit Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence.
[…]
“The Teddy Gun is a profound yet tragically ironic symbol of the absence of government regulations of one of the most dangerous consumer products,” said council executive director Colleen Daley in a statement. “Our goal with Teddy Gun is to raise awareness and encourage elected officials to support measures that can and will save lives.”
The point, then, is that Teddy Gun wouldn’t have to meet so many requirements if his primary function were that of a weapon rather than a toy. And while “key functional elements have intentionally been omitted” to ensure that Teddy will never fire any bullets, the contrast remains striking.
Agency and client have worked together before on projects like 2015’s “The Unforgotten,” which looked to further humanize the victims of gun violence by re-purposing some of the clothes they wore when they were shot.
While new gun control legislation is unlikely to become law in the current American political climate, this potentially lethal teddy bear does serve as a powerful symbol of the double standard applied to firearms.
Andrew Rea’s Binging with Babish recreates iconic (and less famous) dishes from tv and films, including the key dish from Ratatouille. Via DesignTaxi:
Ever wondered how the food on TV shows or films would taste? Like the famous French dish that Disney and Pixar’s animated film Ratatouille was named after, or the ‘Big Kahuna Burger’ from Pulp Fiction?
Pop culture enthusiast and chef Andrew Rea has his mind set on turning these dishes into reality.
On his miniseries entitled ‘Binging with Babish’, Rea runs viewers through his own recreations of iconic and even lesser known foods from famous movies and TV shows.
When he’s not fulfilling his role as a visuals effects artist during the day, Rea experiments deeper into his hobby of cooking, lighting and food in his huge kitchen apartment situated in New York City.
“I’ve always been curious about the ‘Traeger burger’ from the cook-off between ‘Ron’ and ‘Chris’ on Parks and Recreation,” claimed Rea. “I was curious if it actually tasted good or if it was just a list of foodie buzzwords. People liked it and I got good feedback, so I decided to keep making videos.”
With that piloting off to a good start, the birth of his cooking miniseries began as he started to upload weekly videos of his recreations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjKd24UCPYY
An ostrich tries to fly in this amusing new ad for Samsung’s Virtual Reality gear when it accidentally puts on a headset, one that (like many ads) only works with a suspension of belief. Via the Verge:
Samsung just concluded its Unpacked event and it was light on virtual reality news, but the company is making up for it with a Gear VR ad that’s… quite odd. If you can’t or don’t want to watch the video above, the joke is that an ostrich (which, you may recall, is a flightless bird) puts on a Gear VR headset and launches a flight simulator inside it, after which said ostrich is literally able (I think?) to begin soaring above its bemused companions. “We make what can’t be made, so you can do what can’t be done,” reads the tagline, which would also be a decent slogan for Aperture Science.
I could point out a various pedantic things about this video, like the fact that ostriches are probably unable to reach the Gear VR’s trackpad, or genuinely important ones, like the fact that we do VR a disservice by suggesting it’s interchangeable with real-world experience. But I’m too busy trying to figure out what that ostrich is seeing.
See, the Gear VR and similar headsets are built for creatures with front-facing eyes and binocular vision — the screen shows a separate image to each eye, putting wearers into a 3D world. Many birds have eyes on the side of their head, which, as far as I understand, trades this depth perception for a very wide field of view.
One wonders…
Jonathan Coulton has a new music video called “All This Time”, inspired by old text games, and is a cautionary tale against the surveillance state. Via Gizmodo:
Musician Jonathan Coulton has debuted the first video for his upcoming album, Solid State. It’s a glorious send-up of classic text adventure video games, as well as a cautionary tale against the encroaching surveillance state. As a bonus, the album has its own graphic novel. Coulton’s new music video, for his excellent song “All This Time”, can be summed up as a more hopeful version of that “Fifteen Million Merits” episode of Black Mirror. It tells the story of some worker/player struggling to figure out his purpose in life, which largely consists of processing widgets for credits. As the story continues, the power of human connection and empathy surfaces, bridging the gap between man and machine. Coulton made the video himself using an app called Cathode.
The album is tied to a graphic novel by Matt Fraction (The Invincible Iron Man), drawn by Albert Monteys (Universe!) As Boing Boing explained, Solid State is a mind-bending futuristic tale about two men named Bob whose fates are intertwined over time, over the backdrop of an encroaching “nicey-nice fascism” perpetuated by artificial intelligence and growing dependence on technology. Inevitably, as shown in the music video, love is the only thing that can save us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dCJ7a1QjfE
What did we just watch? Skeletor has never looked this good in this hilarious, 80s inspired ad for MoneySuperMarket, jamming to Fame. Via Creativity Online:
Skeletor, the ’80s villain and arch-enemy of He-Man from “Masters of the Universe,” is the star of the latest spot from Moneysupermarket.com, which continues to score YouTube hits with its series of ads in which people feel “epic” thanks to saving money on their car insurance. The “You’re So Moneysupermarket” campaign started with a twerking businessman in hotpants — a film that garnered millions of online hits — followed by a pole-dancing builder and a body-popping bodyguard and last year’s “Epic dance-off” between all those characters. In the new ad, directed by Fredrik Bond at Sonny, Skeletor leaves his candlelit man cave feeling “epic” after saving via Moneysupermarket. He breaks out of his house on a suburban street and goes boogie-ing and shimmying round the neighborhood to “Fame” by Irene Cara. He’s joined by a bunch of schoolkids, and eventually attracts the attention of his old foe He-Man, who exclaims: “By the power of Grayskull — Skeletor, you’re so Moneysupermarket.”
While today’s kids might have no idea who He-Man or Skeletor are, the theme and soundtrack, will doubtless appeal to grown-up 80s kids who are in the market for car insurance.
Strange Beasts is a sci-fi short about a world where an augmented reality game allows you to create your own pet… to odd results. Via Short of the Week:
Director and VFX artist Magali Barbe’s Strange Beasts is a bite-sized bit of twisted genre fiction that would make Charlie Brooker blush. Like the best episodes of the BBC/Netflix show, Barbe crafts a tale that combines day-after-tomorrow technology with dark and satirical themes. Told in “mockumentary” form with a glossy commercial sensibility, the film depicts a new augmented reality game that allows the user to create and grow your own pet. But, as the tagline suggests, how far are people willing to go to live in a fantasy environment of their own creation?
Barbe’s background as a VFX and pre-viz artist (this is her first live action short) are evident. The integration between the CG overlays and live action footage are well-designed and expertly composited. But, the true wonder here is how subtly and efficiently Barbe conveys her story. The world building is simple, yet effective. And, while the film’s brevity means that the plot itself isn’t particularly complex, it’s still surprising and visually imaginative. The final reveal really knocked me for a loop. Perhaps I’m somewhat of a daft screener, but I honestly didn’t see the end “punchline” coming. In turn, the film ends on an impactful, somewhat disturbing narrative exclamation point that is perfect for the short form.
In a novel development, the Mexico Tourism Board has created a tequila cloud. Just in case you needed more reasons to visit Mexico. Via the Huffington Post:
The tourism board installed the boozy cloud at an art gallery in rain-drenched Berlin this week to remind local residents that it’s always a little sunnier in Mexico. The contraption was synced with the local weather patterns, so whenever it rained in Berlin, the “tequila cloud” would rain too, according to LAPIZ.
But don’t get too excited. This cloud won’t be able to float freely outdoors.
This alcohol-infused cloud is actually a tequila-based mist held together by a plastic container that helps the mist keep its cloud-like shape. A team at LAPIZ used ultrasonic humidifiers to “vibrate” the tequila at a frequency that turns the alcohol into the visible mist. Then, that mist is pushed into a plastic container, where all the magic happens.
“The tequila was pushed into an invisible plastic structure where sprays of tequila mixed with the vapor formed the cloud,” Luciana Cani, the agency’s executive creative director, told The Huffington Post. The vapor and sprays of tequila condense inside of the plastic, then drops form the cloud, under which drinkers can hold out their shot glasses. “With the plastic, we created a base the vapor could form around,” Cani said. “But the most important function of the plastic was to work as a condensation surface for the tequila mist.”