Blogbook
Born to be Mild is a documentary that celebrates the Dull Men’s Club by exploring their uncommon, strange and cheerful hobbies. Via Short of the Week:
Taking us on a tour of the extraordinarily ordinary, Andy Oxley’s short film Born to be Mild is a celebration of everything ‘dull, not boring’. From photographing mailboxes to collecting milk bottles, this 15-min documentary introduces its audience to the Dull Men’s Club – an online organisation that shows “it’s OK to be dull”.
For a film about dullness, Born to be Mild is surprisingly entertaining. Delivered with a pitch-perfect, lighthearted tone without ever feeling condescending to its subjects, Oxley and his team use a carefully-considered production approach to compliment their story.
Mixing static camera shots with quintessentially dull Musaq, there’s no fancy techniques needed to make this story work and of course, that’s feels like just the right the approach considering the subject of the piece.
“The subject felt relevant to me in that it provided a complete antidote to the fast pace of modern living”, says director Oxley (in an interview with the BBC), “I found their approach to life strangely refreshing…I have always been drawn to the more mundane, everyday aspects of life. So when I stumbled across the Dull Men’s Club, I got quite excited and couldn’t stop myself from making a film about them. These men see everyday things differently, and I loved sitting back and listening to them talk”.
The following discussion is about how to build a brand for big property development. What to do, when, and why.
Get yourself a glass of red wine. Now a piece of white paper. Hold the wine up to your mouth, take a swig, and be a bit messy about it, so some of the wine dribbles over the rim of the glass. Watch the drop slowly run down the side of the glass, down the stem, onto the curve of the base. Move the glass to and fro, just so. If you do it right, you’ll end up with a red line around most of the base. Stick the base onto the piece of paper. Pick it up again, drink the rest of the wine.
You should have on the piece of paper a red, messy, almost-complete circle of about 8cm across. You photograph this and send the photo to the client. If you’re a designer, you call this a logo and charge $30,000 for it. If you’re a really smart designer, you’ll sell them on three different colours of the same logo for another $5,000 each.
I can show you at least half a dozen similar logos currently in the market place for very similar projects. And the designers who did them don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. The engineers and architects and accountants who approved them don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. They all think, cause it looks like the others, they are in the ‘fashion’ of the moment…bozos.
Agencies do things differently.
Good ad agencies put serious thought into the whole game. Especially the psychology of how it all hangs together. But if you’re not a seasoned large scale developer, you may not know the disciplines…or why you ought to use a disciplined ad agency over a bunch of hip, cute, but dumb designers.
Welcome to the world of property, big time. I’m not talking about doing the local paper ads for an apartment block of 8 or 10 in Caulfield. I’m talking 2,000, 5,000 or 20,000 house lots – whole suburbs. …
In this excellent science fiction dystopian short film, Dust, evolution happens really quickly, with often deadly consequences. The film was funded through Kickstarter and was inspired by anime and horror tropes. Via Short of the Week:
Absolutely one of my favorite VFX sci-fi/fantasy releases of the year, Mike Grier’s dystopian, environmental parable combines everything I love about the form, from gorgeous practical design with tasteful VFX work, to a genuinely satisfying story set within an exciting and interesting world.
The setup is a bit cliché of course—an outsider, part of an ancient but disparaged order, nurses a crushing heartbreak that has alienated him from society. Yet, in the face of catastrophic disease that threatens civilization, he is marshaled into finding a cure. Irezumi, played by noted Japanese actor Mashasi Odate, is a bit different though than a normal protagonist—first off he is Asian, which allows the filmmakers to draw upon a different set of traditional associations than we in the West are used to in order to flesh out the character. Additionally, as a “tracker” the ancient order he belongs to, Irezumi’s skills are not merely survivalist, he is also a scientist, his observational skills as a zoologist and a botanist are arguably more important than his physical skills.
Grier lists anime and classic horror as key inspirations for the film, and the anime influences are especially noticeable in the film’s themes, if not necessarily its look, including the film’s emphasis on environmental degradation (Miyazaki, most notably in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind) as well the concept of “living in balance”. While I have not confirmed it with the filmmaker, I would bet strongly that Irezumi, a lone ambassador whose fights against the fantastical creatures of the forest are tinged with a sentiment of deep sadness and hopeful desire to achieve harmony, is heavily modeled off the anime tv show Mushi-shi, a show that is not well known in the West, but considered one of the classics of the past 10 years.
In this great silent autoplay ad for the Clinton campaign, model and deaf activist Nyle DiMarco makes the case for her in the upcoming election. Via Adweek:
If you’re on one of the three major social networks, you’re used to videos that play automatically when you scroll through your feed. In fact, you’re probably so used to autoplay that you don’t stop and watch the whole video or even turn on the sound.
That’s what the Clinton campaign is betting on with its new silent ad featuring model and deaf activist Nyle DiMarco who asks people to consider using their voices to vote in November.
The campaign released the 51-second spot on Clinton’s Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, which all employ autoplay. In the spot DiMarco addresses the viewer directly: “You can leave this ad muted—there’s nothing to hear. And keep scrolling past if you want. We’re used to being ignored. But if you’re still listening to my voice, please know that there are a lot of people out there without one.”
By using the autoplay feature, the campaign incorporates a key campaign message while commenting on the treatment of Americans with disabilities.
In 2016, DiMarco became the first deaf contestant to win Dancing With the Stars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R27KHLQ0cIU
Apple dropped several great new ads for its new iPhone, based on the tagline “Practically Magic”, highlighting low light camera and other features. Anyone getting the new phone?
Via Adweek:
Apple broke a pair of iPhone 7 commercials during the Emmy Awards on Sunday night, advertising the latest incarnation of the device with the line: “Practically magic.” The spots push two improvements in particular—the camera’s upgraded abilities in low light, and the phone’s overall new water resistance.
The low-light camera benefit got the prime placement—a 60-second spot (from TBWA\Media Arts Lab) which, aptly enough, features some of the best lighting we’ve seen in a commercial in some time. The plot concerns a skateboarder who goes for a midnight ride, snapping pics along the way of everything from moths around a lightbulb to a deer strolling around a gas station.
The spot also hints briefly at the phone’s water resistance, as our hero takes presumably rather more dubious footage for posterity of some lawn sprinklers that he cruises through early in the ad.
The music is “In a Black Out” by Hamilton Leithauser and Rostam, and it’s one of those tracks that people will seek out just from the commercial. On that front, the timing couldn’t be better, as the album, I Had A Dream That You Were Mine, is being released this week.
The other spots:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTFPB4OUqrM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw2-K8w8l7I&feature=youtu.be
ICYMI: Netflix aired ads for their powerful SheRules campaign over the Emmys, celebrating female characters in their programmes. Via CNN:
Netflix didn’t take home a ton of hardware at the Emmys this year, but the company was able to make waves on Twitter with an ad it ran during the TV awards show ceremony.
The spot is called “She Rules,” and it highlights the strong female leads on some of Netflix’s most successful shows.
The ad comes as the issue of diversity in Hollywood has come to the forefront in recent years, and was very well received on social media. The ad comes at a time when more people in Hollywood are using their fame to as a platform to speak out about gender issues — from equal pay to sexual harassment and typecasting, to name a few.
[…]
Netflix and other streaming services often seem to feature more diverse programming than their older small screen counterparts. “We’re programming for diverse and eclectic tastes and for an increasingly global audience,” Cindy Holland, vice president of original content for Netflix, told Variety in 2015. “So the folks working on those titles and the folks here at Netflix serving those consumers have to increasingly be more reflective of the audience we serve and the programs we make.”
The UN launches its VR app, teeing up with filmmakers from around the globe to share their 360 videos, and highlight global issues. Via Adweek:
“[T]he UN is launching UNVR, a mobile app that will be a destination for VR films created by the UN and filmmakers around the world. Thanks to partnerships with Samsung and Oculus, the intergovernmental organization is using its massive reach to distribute 360-degree camera gear to more than 100 UN countries so filmmakers can tell their own stories about where they live.
The goal is to “democratize VR,” Arora said, putting cameras in the hands of creators of different races, different genders, different classes, different beliefs on every continent. Gear has already been shipped to about 10 “hot spot” places like Aleppo, Congo, Gaza, with a larger rollout planned for mid-October.
“I always see this project as an incredible nexus of people who are in the policy world, the tech world and the Hollywood world, the filmmaker world,” he said. “Rarely do those three come together, and I think that UNVR makes this compelling for all of those people.”
The UNVR app won’t just be about watching compelling stories. In fact, the goal is to add a call to action to each film as a way to connect viewers who are moved by a cause to a way to help. That might be through volunteering time, donating money to a nonprofit or hosting a viewing to spread awareness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2j2-DqcPfM
A Depressed T-Rex and Audi… a parodic, strangely heartwarming ad about a tyrannosaurus rex with issues and how Audi helps it out. Because car ads have to do something weird to stand out from the pack nowadays. Via Adweek:
This unexpected heartbreaker of an ad goes on to explore the depths of T-Rex’s debilitating depression. He stares dejectedly out the window and spends all his time in bed. Sports don’t help, and basic homemaking is just too difficult. His pillows are covered in deep slashes, like the shredded portrait of the bereft prince in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.
Then he discovers something that changes the game. “Magic is the feeling I had. It was absolute magic. It completed me … and I really got that sense of, I’m back.”
This marks the debut ad for Audi’s Piloted Driving feature. Created by Razorfish, it was directed by Stephan Wever of Stink, with Germany-based Sehsucht managing VFX.
“The biggest challenge was to make the dinosaur look depressed,” explains VFX head Florian Zachau of Sehsucht. “A T-Rex is a rather stiff character, and there is not a lot of variety on expression and gestures the animators could use in order to bring out the sadness. The interview scene in particular was not easy. There is a very thin line between making it look natural rather than awkward.”
The future according to kids – and play doh – is an adorable ad campaign that asks kids to imagine what they think the future would be like. Via Mental Floss:
Play-Doh, the wallpaper cleaning material-turned-sculpting compound, turns 60 today. To celebrate, the brand asked parents from around the world to share their kids’ predictions for what the future holds via social media. Some kids predicted dinosaurs would make a comeback; others thought we’d take a rocket to Mars; and still others thought the future would be rife with robots. The brand’s official sculptor then brought those visions to life using nothing but Play-Doh, a process which took more than 40 hours to complete and required 200-plus cans of the compound. You can see the sculpts—and timelapse video of them being created—exclusively below, then share your own predictions for the future on social media using #PLAYDOH60 and #WORLDPLAYDOHDAY.
About the video above:
With the discovery of new Goldilocks planets—so named because they’re “just right” for hosting life—happening all the time, this prediction seems likely to become a reality. As for what our future alien besties might look like, scientists have a few theories of their own (green tentacled monster sadly isn’t one of them).
More videos and sculpts in the link. Check them out!
This incredible new Netflix series is part of a push to get the White Helmets of Syria recognised with a Nobel Peace Prize. Via IndieWire:
As the U.S, and Russia agree upon another tentative ceasefire in Syria, civilians on the ground are not holding their breath that the fighting will end. Syrian civilians have been let down far too many times. Instead, the Syrian people are continuing to do as they have done for the past few years, taking humanitarian matters into their own hands to minimize loss of life.
The White Helmets, a group of nearly 3,000 civilian volunteer rescue workers, exemplify this spirit. These are the men and women who run into smoldering rubble, the aftermath of airstrikes, dig out the dead and injured. They come from all walks of life and have each pledged to save anyone in need, no matter their creed, religion or political beliefs.
[…]
For the past three years, the White Helmets have quietly carried out their vital work. Whenever a news report has detailed yet another atrocity on a hospital or school that has been targeted by the Assad regime, or its ally Russia, the people in the background carrying victims from the rubble have invariably been White Helmets. Rarely have they been the subjects of the reports themselves. However, it seems that the world is finally beginning to recognize their extraordinary efforts with a nomination for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize and the endorsement of a range of high profile champions from Thandie Newton and George Clooney to Michelle Yeoh and Justin Timberlake.