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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_whjfNkvGw

The diamond industry’s first ad in half a decade targets, unsurprisingly, millennials… with the tagline ‘Real is Rare. Real is a Diamond’. Umm. Not sure if we’re sold on that, but more via Adweek:

“The data shows that millennials buy the most diamonds in the U.S., so this is a proactive measure to make sure that this isn’t simply tied to rituals like marriage,” Mother New York senior strategist Thomas Henry tells Adweek. “On the flip side, while most millennials do get married, it’s just not quite the same cultural institution that it used to be. … but that doesn’t change the desire to be in a meaningful long-term relationship.”

To that point, the couple in “Wild & Kind” isn’t quite sure whether they will get ever married, but they remain dedicated to one another.

“As a director I was attracted by the theme of love as an unpolished drama,” says Casper Balslev of RSA Films. “Being in a relationship can be a tough challenge, as much as an adventure. It’s personal and it’s intense.”

The tagline’s meaning is twofold: Just as “real” relationships are more authentic and desirable, the DPA wants to position true gemstones—instead of low-priced imitations like sapphires or cubic zirconia—as the same and have them represent the “real” relationship.

Funny Girls parodies truck commercials, replacing the man behind the wheel with a woman, to the surprise of the voice over. Via DesignTaxi:

It is no secret that SUVs and trucks have a history of marketing towards men. The throaty male voice-over, coupled with scenes of the truck driving over trails and rivers, are all too familiar advertising tropes.

To mock these sexist advertisements, Funny Girls produced a parody sketch, replacing the man behind the wheel with a woman—much to the surprise of a chauvinistic male voiceover, who refuses to believe a woman can operate a truck or even own a farm.

After a successful debut season in 2015, Funny Girls is set to return:

The series, starring local comedian Rose Matafeo at its helm, announced its plans to provide a dedicated talent development initiative to help advance local women in comedy.

“We’ve had many sketch shows in the history of New Zealand television, but none with a dominant female cast and created by women,” said Matafeo ahead of the show’s launch.

“It’s just – it’s a way of pretty much supporting women who are trying to work in comedy. I think it’s such an amazing opportunity, especially to introduce newer writers and performers into television and onto screens for people to get to know,” she said.

Planet Unknown is a really impressive student project by Shawn Wang, a science fiction short reminiscent of Wall-E and Wire Cutters. Via Short of the Week:

To put it simply…Planet Unknown is glorious, unapologetic eye-candy! Overflowing with carefully-created textures, particles and environments, Wang’s vivid visuals are a real joy to behold. In fact, Wang’s film is technically so impressive, it’s hard to believe he created all the animation for the film single-handedly – but that’s exactly what he did.

Utilising a long list of tools throughout its creation (as Wang lists: “Cinema 4D, plugin TurbulenceFD and Octane for C4D were heavily used for most of the tasks. Houdini was used to fracture things. Then Zbrush for sculpting, Mari for texturing, After Effects for compositing, and Premiere for editing. Python and JavaScript were used for scripting in C4D, Mari and AE, which helped speed up the process a lot”), Planet Unknown took 11-months to complete, with a further 3-months for Bristol-based Echoic Audio to complete the original score & sound design.

Currently recovering from all the man hours he put into Planet Unknown, Wang has recently graduated from the Communication University of China (we hope you got top marks for this impressive short Shawn?), but looks to create further independent films in the future.

This ASUS phone ad is street sourced from ordinary New Yorkers, and the result, perhaps predictably, is sheer lolsy chaos. The public sure does love its dinosaurs. From Creativity Online:

Asus, the Taiwanese computer brand, asked ordinary New Yorkers to come up with ideas for a new commercial to launch its ZenFone 3 smartphone — and then turned the whole exercise into an amusing ad.

While crowdsourcing ideas for a commercial isn’t new, the difference here is that agency SuperHeroes randomly asked people on the streets for ideas for the script. It then got comedic duo Matt Rubano and Betsy Kenney, from New York’s “Upright Citizens Brigade,” to act out the scenes and lip synch the actual lines that people came up with in the filmed interviews. The result is a ridiculous B-movie type storyline about aliens and dinosaurs, and an “international car model” called Ronaldo. Oh, and possibly the greatest end line we’ve heard in an ad recently (“Buy it. Don’t be a douche.”)

Halal’s Nils Gerbens directed the final film, which is part of the global launch campaiagn for the ZenFone 3, tying in with the idea that the phone can empower users to become anything they want. Even a commercial director.

Japan’s Tojinbo Cliffs has a suicide vigilante who has reportedly saved hundreds of people: documented in Gatekeeper by Field of Vision. Via the Atlantic:

Yukio Shige is a retired Japanese police detective with a huge self-imposed burden: to patrol the Tojinbo Cliffs to stop people from jumping to their deaths. He talks individuals away from the steep drop and takes them to a cafe, working with volunteers to help these individuals seek mental help. Gatekeeper is a remarkable and intimate 39-minute documentary that follows Shige as he monitors the sheer cliffs, which have become a notoriously popular destination for suicides in Japan. So far, he’s saved over 500 people. Still, it’s a massive undertaking with societal challenges: Japan has one of the highest suicide rates of any developed country. An average of 70 people kill themselves every day.

More on Japan Today:

“I’m the chotto matte man.” “Chotto matte” means, “Hold on, wait.” Don’t jump yet. Talk to me first. […] You can tell, generally, when a solitary wanderer is no mere sightseer. If someone looks troubled, Shige or one of the others approaches and starts a casual conversation: “Hi, where’re you from?” “Leave me alone, I’ve had enough!” “Chotto matte…

If you’re a huge Mad Max fan, you’ve probably heard of Wasteland, a four-day postapocalyptic festival set in a Californian desert. For the rest of us, though, WIRED has the scoop:

Chaos is the norm at Wasteland, the “world’s largest post-apocalyptic festival” that turns the Mojave Desert into a glorious vision of hell on earth. For four days each September, thousands of survivors maraud a patch of dirt and sand east of Bakersfield, California, in wild jalopies and wage epic bungee-battles in a two-story Thunderdome.

Wasteland combines the coolest parts of Mad Max and Fallout with a dash of Dune in a simple premise: The end of civilization has left a scrappy band of survivors to pillage a scorched, dead planet. Some 2,500 people—the largest crowd in the event’s seven-year history—braved this brutal world last weekend, settling into themed tribes like Skulduggers and Vermin Vagabonds.

Wasteland is fully immersive. Costumes are mandatory—no gawkers allowed—and must be in character. Don’t even think about crossing over from another universe like Star Wars. Attendees come from all over the country and spend the year before planning their get-ups and car mods. And if the world ever really does go to hell? “Some will be well prepared,” says Jared Butler, Wasteland’s event director and cofounder. “The others, well, they’ll be poorly prepared, but they’ll look fabulous.”

Indiana Jones superfan Patrick Schoenmaker has created this incredible fanmade opening sequence for an imaginary animated series. He worked on it for five years (!!). Patrick is a character designer and animator based in the Netherlands who has worked for Lucasfilm, UNGA toys, Capgemini, KLM, IlLuster, Acme Archives, Topps, Cartoon Saloon and Sesame Street. Via an interview on Inverse:

My background is in animation, and the seed for how you’d translate the Indiana Jones character into an animated style was already somewhere in my mind. The print was the best chance to explore that.

The preliminary sketches I had were really cartoony, and I felt that it broke with the Indiana Jones world. If it’s too much of a cartoon, it loses the danger and thrill. It becomes too slapstick. Each draft, I started over with what worked in the previous attempts to keep making it better.

[…]

Certain websites make it look like there’s a full feature film coming up, but it’s more of a proof of concept. My main idea was not to make a trailer that would have just been an excuse to take some random scenes and edit them together to look cool. I wanted a story, but I didn’t have the time to make it a full short, so instead, I came up with something like the intro to the Batman animated series.

Somebody give this man a budget!

ECLA’s new gaming robot, Deltu, is a little too human, even if it doesn’t look it – it’s prone to gquitting if you’re not worthy. From the video:

Project by ECAL/Alexia Léchot
Tutors: Alain Bellet, Cyril Diagne, Gaël Hugo, Christophe Guignard, Cédric Duchêne,
Assistants : Laura Perrenoud, Tibor Udvari, Romain Cazier
ECAL / University of Art and Design, Lausanne Switzerland
Bachelor Media & Interaction Design
Filmed and edited by Alexia Léchot, Pauline Saglio
ecal.ch + ECAL – Bachelor Media&Interaction Design

Deltu is a delta robot with a personality that interacts with humans via two iPads.
Depending on its mood, it plays with the user who is faced with an artificial intelligence simulation, who appreciates the small pleasures of life, sometimes too much.
The relationship we have with robots/AI that have been created to enhance our performance, but have become a source of learning, is unique and exciting. The android’s place in ociety has not yet been defined and remains to be determined; for me it is the best source of inspiration.

What is a Delta Robot!?

Simply put, a type of parallel robot with three arms connected to universal joints at the base. They’re popularly used in factories as efficient packaging and picking machines as they can be quite fast. More here, for the technically inclined.

On behalf of the Clio Awards, Nick Offerman, Megan Mullally and Funny or Die have done a skit on the notorious 1991 Clio Awards. Via Adweek:

It remains the most notorious night in advertising history—June 13, 1991.

The Clio Awards were scheduled to hand out their radio and print awards. But as Adweek later told the story, “what ensued was less an ad-award show than a tawdry circus, an event so grossly mismanaged that its trajectory from embarrassing to appalling seemed, in retrospect, almost destined—’beyond the beyond-o,’ as Ruth Ayres of DDB Needham put it.

“The ceremony started late, was hosted largely by the caterer, featured presenters who (when they weren’t singing Irish lullabies) tried to guess the agency winners since they had no list, and was aborted when fevered, greedy ad types rushed the stage in a mad grab for Clios they hadn’t won.”

It was quite the shameful scene indeed. But now, at least, Clio can laugh about it.

On this 25th anniversary of the 1991 debacle, Clio got Funny Or Die to re-enact that fateful night in an amusing video starring Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman—the latter acting as host of a fictitious show called Unresolved Mysteries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieD5iWmJplw

Southwest Airlines’ new ad campaigns are a series of wacky, glitzy mini musicals as part of the carrier’s “Transfarency” campaign, featuring actual airline employees. Do they work? We’re not sure. They definitely entertain, and try to push Southwest Airlines’ attempt to make travelling with them a (scarily?) positive experience:

“We celebrate our constant ability to stand alone. We embrace that, and it’s purposeful. With these ads, we wanted to represent that Southwest is the carrier of choice for getting you where you need to go, but always having some fun along the way.” -Helen Limpitlaw, Southwest Airlines ad director

The other spots:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncQeJSMEn4Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKOgGU47WLE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lq22hf6tNI

Credits

Agency: GSD&M
Chief Creative Officer: Jay Russell
Group Creative Directors: Scott Brewer, Ryan Carroll, Lara Bridger
Creative Directors: Nikki Baker, Leslie Shaffer
Sibling Creative Team: Rafael Serrano, Laura Canzano, Gus Solis
Planners: Jennifer Billiot, Michael Dezso
Account Service: Carter Nance, Shawn Mackoff, Amy Lyon, Audrey Henderson
Sibling Account Service: Ana Leen
Project Manager: Elizabeth Stelling
Business Affairs Manager: Desiree Townsend
TV:
Art Directors: Mike Ferrer, Judd Oberly
Writers: Mark Snow, Michael Page
Director of Production: Jack Epsteen
Executive Producer: Marianne Newton
Producers: Rob Lee, Lauren Beightler
Production Company: Smuggler
Director: Jun Diaz
Editorial: Cutters
Editors: Matt Walsh, Grant Gustafson
Out-of-Home/Experiential:
Art Directors: Lisa Donato, Rye Clifton
Writers: Shannon Lorenzon, Hayden Griffin, Amanda Whitehead
Art Buyer: Jessica Spruill
Producer: Leigh Ann Proctor
Account Service: Patty Liendo, Victoria Huffines, Garrett Menichini, Kristen Arsenault