Blogbook
A Chanel Bag causes all sorts of problems in this editorial Harper Bazaar film about the bag and its role in a friendship between two women. Via Adweek:
These kinds of films succeed best when they’re both aspirational and relatable—as in this one, where women can afford buying each other $3,600 handbags yet still fight over them. (By the same token, the idea that a Chanel Gabrielle bag could be more valuable than a friendship could be considered both hyperbole and yet possibly true.)
What’s undeniable is the charm of storytelling liberated from the hard sell, and from the stilted affectations of high-fashion TV spots.
“This is storytelling outside the confines of the 30-second spot, and really it’s just supposed to entertain,” said Beug. “The brief was minimal, and I loved having the freedom to shape the story and the narrative. Working with Annabelle Dexter-Jones was a total pleasure. She’s such an accomplished actress, the camera loves her and she brought the perfect amount of naughtiness to the role.”
“Lena’s ability to successfully merge high fashion and humor made this project different from anything I have ever edited,” added Cutting Room’s Chris Hellman. “This unique combination is what gives the piece so much sexiness and sass.
Matt Bollinger’s Apartment 6F is a hand-painted stopmotion thriller that takes inspiration from the artist’s life and from 60s horror. Via It’s Nice That:
“I wanted to combine the mundane everyday with something heightened that seemed to burst through from the character’s imagination,” explains Brooklyn-based Matt. In the animation, a freelance web designer in New York is invited to a housewarming by a neighbour, after his wife goes on a trip. Matt adds: “After drinking too much, social anxiety and possibly unnatural occult influences cause him to spiral into dark visions, which are suspended only when his wife returns.”
The project took three months for Matt to complete, and his process was long and detailed, which started with making 54 small paintings on canvas. “Each of these was the opening frame of a shot in the video. Then, with the painting on a copy stand, I modified each one a small amount and took a photograph,” says Matt. “I would repeat this process sometimes hundreds of times per canvas.”
The transition between scenes is beautiful, Matt’s mark makings are visible and full of texture, adding another layer to the narrative. As a painter originally, Matt felt comfortable using these hands-on materials, as he found them easier to manipulate. “I made my earlier animations using relatively dry drawing materials (ball point pen, felt-tipped marker, and correction fluid). This new process allowed me to animate the liquid qualities of the paint in ways that took on a personified dimension,” he explains.
Futuracha is the most successfully crowdfunded font in history, by Athenian studio Høly. And no, it doesn’t look anything like Helvetica. Via FastCo Design:
“The transition from the old version to the new one proved to be truly demanding,” says Odysseas Galinos Paparounis, designer of Futuracha and CEO of Høly. “In order to make Futuracha Pro as easy as possible to employ, we had to come up with numerous letter variations and glyphs, so that at the end of the day, everybody can simply type with it, without bothering with typographic principles, which the mechanism of alternations take care of.”
But the effort was worth it: It was specifically this combination of forces that made Futuracha Pro a landmark success. The original font was a good product, and it already had a big audience thanks to its free distribution (and thanks to that audience, a waiting list of 10,000 people awaiting an updated version). The team relaunched it as a markedly improved 2.0 take–which could be privately licensed for $15 and commercially licensed for $50, each a relatively low price. In other words, Futuracha is yet another overnight success that, upon further examination, required years of development and brand building.
Future Boyfriend is about the deeply creepy, somewhat charming and sort of hilarious perils of dating a surprise time traveler. Via Short Film of the Week:
The clever writing of this screenplay by A. Vincent Ularich manages to involve an immense amount of this depth in a mere 10 minutes. A film with a narrative such as this has to be executed perfectly, and executed perfectly it was. There are some key lines that really have substance, such as a moment in the beggining where Stuart tells Kaylie that he’s putting her purse on the back of her chair; a line in which is referenced towards the end of the short where he’s watching a clip of future Kaylie asking where her purse is, while present Kaylie simultaneously asks the same question. I found this to be really clever and well thought out. The performances by Bell and Morehouse we extremely convincing, with Morehouse coming across as a desperate creep and Bell playing the shocked and surprised role with skill. These two have a certain chemistry, and that certainly came across in the finished product nicely. This is the type of storyline that is both made for short films, but also difficult to sell in a small amount of time. Directory Ben Rock was able to quickly develop these characters, almost as if we knew who there were within the first minute, which really allowed for the plot to flow nicely.
Six Second Storytelling was a challenge by SXSW to cram the plot of a classic novella such as Dracula into a six second film clip. Via DesignTaxi:
The advertising landscape is quickly changing. Traditional marketing just doesn’t cut it anymore in this digital age. Brands are hastily thinking up new ways to cut through the noise and grab viewers’ attention in an increasingly competitive arena.
Earlier this year, you saw ads masked as short films including HP’s Wolf and the ‘Grow Up’ series by Mercedes-Benz. Now YouTube has turned to an entirely new ad format in a bid to prove to brands: it can deliver persuasive sales pitches in bite-sized form.
It’s partnered with renowned ad agencies such as J. Walter Thompson, Wieden+Kennedy and Deutsch to promote this brief pre-roll ad format.
The campaign, ‘Six Second Storytelling’, was initially a part of a challenge hosted at SXSW and involves cramming classic novella into six-second footage.
Some of the literature referenced included Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. The creative geniuses behind the ads didn’t forget to add modern twists to the cherished stories.
A classic example would have to be Wieden+Kennedy’s portrayal of Dracula. Titled ‘No Pics No Proof: A Dracula Story’, ‘Dracula’ is seen towards the end of the video spamming selfies with his new kill.
30,000 paint chips, 5,600 hours of work and 24 production artists went into the creation of Sherwin-Williams’ new “Colour Chips” ad. Via Adweek:
“We know people aren’t inspired by paint itself. What people really care about is the transformation a coat of paint can provide,” says Jonathan Cude, chief creative officer at McKinney, which developed the spot with Buck Studios. “Our worlds of color chips are about inspiring you with the possibilities for your home.”
Crafting a jungle scene lets the client’s full range really roar.
“We’ve got bold, colorful moments with the flamingos,” says Cude, “but there are softer, more neutral moments with the elephants and giraffes, too.”
All told, 30 unique models appear, and the level of detail is striking. You’ll note that the flora, rocks and even the shimmery surface of a lake are constructed from paint tiles.
And as it turns out, true colors come shining through.
“We originally thought about featuring a beautiful, orange-striped tiger,” says Cude, “but we had to stay geographically accurate. Tigers live in Asia, not Africa.”
Standby is a BAFTA-nominated short film that takes place entirely within a police car written and directed by Charlotte Regan. Via Short of the Week:
Recently nominated for a prestigious BAFTA award and screened at the Toronto International and London Short film festivals, Charlotte Regan’s Standby is a short hitting the internet with a great deal of anticipation surrounding it. A touching, comical 5-minute film set entirely in the front seats of a police car, Regan’s short uses some clever editing to get her audience truly invested in the film’s main characters in such a brief run-time.
Created as the final film of her studies at Ravensbourne college, Standby tells the story of Police officers Gary (Andrew Paul) and Jenny (Alexa Morden) and how their bond develops as they spend more and more time together in their shared, cramped “office space”.
Cleverly jumping through key moments in their relationship, the film takes you through the duo’s cold beginnings to their emotional “break-up”. Regan says the film was inspired by “dads that struggle to verbalise their love but show it so clearly in their subtle actions” and it’s certainly the connection between her two main characters (and the performances from her lead actors) that gives the film its impact – it’s a real emotional rollercoaster.
Litbait tries to troll readers into reading classic books with “clickbait” headlines which are actually the plots of well-known novels. Via Adweek:
Facebook posts featured witty teases like “British guy dies after selfie gone wrong” (The Picture of Dorian Grey), “Teenage girl tricked boyfriend into killing himself” (Romeo and Juliet), “When it’s OKAY to slut shame single mothers” (The Scarlet Letter) and—wait for it!—”This Italian politician makes Trump look like a saint” (The Prince by Machiavelli … which got as passionate a response as you can expect).
The campaign launched on Sept. 6, which was National Read a Book Day. When users clicked on the links, they were directed to a blog post that included the text of the entire book. (Talk about a long read.)
While it’s unlikely people stuck around to read a six-hour blog post, The Wild Detectives says “Litbait” yielded a 14,000 percent boost in site traffic (leading one to wonder what its traffic was before) and 150 percent more post engagement on Facebook.
“You fell for the bait, now fall for the book,” the video concludes, which pretty much sums up the goal of the campaign—to remind people that there are way better things to read than clickbaity articles on the internet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRfjiRsLI40
Steaks on a plane with Samuel L Jackson and Spike Lee for Capital One for their latest March Madness campaign from DDB Chicago. Via Adweek:
A cheeky reference to Jackson’s infamously on-the-nose 2006 film Snakes on a Plane, the scene captures the kind of antics the trio perform in six new ads, which launched Sunday and follow the baller, the actor and the director as they try to enjoy college basketball, and mock each other relentlessly.
In one, Barkley wears a sweatshirt backwards, so he can eat potato chips out of the hood by simply dipping his chin, instead of using his hands. In another, Jackson’s enthusiastic applause during a game triggers Barkley’s clap-activated on-off switch—killing the TV and the lights at a crucial moment.
Sportscaster Jim Nantz gets cut off in that voice-only cameo, but the man himself appears in a different spot, outshining Barkley’s celebrity in Phoenix.
Overall, the spots—directed by Lee—make for a solid addition to the bank’s “Road Trip” campaign, which for the past couple of years relied on pun humor and bad but heartfelt sing-a-longs from the three celebrities to mark its sponsorship of the tournament.
At moments, the new spots feel a bit contrived, and almost patronizing to audiences—like overplayed caricatures of household names trying to goof around like normal people—but even then they’re entertaining, and convincing, enough.
More spots available from the Adweek link above.
50 years later, Heinz has “approved” Don Draper’s Pass the Heinz concept for them, producing it exactly as he intended. Via Adweek:
It was a compelling idea, even if the client wan’t convinced at the time.
Fifty years ago, in the fictional world of Mad Men, Don Draper pitched a daring ad campaign to Heinz execs, for the brand’s ketchup, that proposed not showing the product at all. Instead, the ads would show close-ups of foods that go great with ketchup—french fries, a cheeseburger, a slice of steak—but without any ketchup in sight.
Don’s proposed tagline: “Pass the Heinz.”
The campaign’s “Got Milk?”-like strategy of creating a craving for a product through its absence was apparently too far ahead of its time. Don didn’t get the account. (Nor, for that matter, did Peggy Olson, who, pitching for a competing agency, presented a much more product-centric campaign right after Don.)
But now, in 2017, the time for “Pass the Heinz” has come.
In a meta union of advertising’s real and fictional worlds, Heinz just greenlighted the ads—and will run them almost exactly as Draper intended, beginning today, in print and out-of-home executions in New York City.
Partly a PR stunt, partly just solid on-brand communications, the campaign is sure to delight fans of the AMC show, which in July will celebrate the 10th anniversary of its premiere. And in a nice touch, the ads are officially being credited to Heinz’s current agency, David Miami, and to Don’s fictional 1960s firm, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. (Draper and Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, who approved the idea, are both listed in the credits.)