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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jssXjtYoDl0

Japan has now brought us air bonsai, because, why not. More:

Despite the visual beauty and life-giving nature of plants, there’s always been one main problem with our vegetative friends: plants can’t fly. A small company called Hoshinchu based out of Kyushu, Japan, recently set out to fix the problem that evolution forgot by inventing the Air Bonsai, a system for magnetically levitating small bonsai trees several inches above a small electrified pedestal. The system allows you to create your own miniature Avatar-like worlds with tiny trees or shrubs planted in balls of moss, but is also powerful enough to suspend special ceramic dishes of fragments of lava rock.

Happy Friday!

It’s Superbowl ad season, and Pokémon has come out with a surprisingly strong, Nike-esque showing that places their most popular characters in real life. The massively popular game is celebrating its 20th anniversary, with a Pokémon 20 fan site featuring fan mail from its many fans, and on Feb 27 Nintendo will relaunch Red, Blue and Yellow on 3DS in celebration.

What is Pokémon?

Created by Satoshi Tajiri in 1995 when he was 30 years old, it is really a media franchise focused on a game about fictional monster/animals and their trainers, which catch or rear these creatures for battle or sport. The original games were roleplaying games with an element of strategy, created by Satoshi Tajiri for the Gameboy. From the game it has since branched out into film, tv, huge amounts of merchandise – including a large flagship store in Tokyo – trading cards, comics and more, including having their livery printed on Shinkansen trains and All Nippon Airways Boeing jets. Published by Nintendo, it is the second most successful and lucrative video game franchise in the world, behind Nintendo’s Mario franchise, and earned $2 billion in 2014 alone. Given the huge success of the series, it’s perhaps inevitable that they did move into Superbowl, with an ad that has such high production values. Happy 50th anniversary, guys!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox4DXRYrvz0

This ad for Intel called ‘Experience Amazing’, for digital and tv, apparently took mcgarrybowen over a year to make. Fitting the iconic Intel jingle into Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, it’s targeted at millennials:

It will attempt to show consumers a side of the brand they’re not familiar with—specifically, how its technologies don’t just hide in motherboards, but power the worlds of art, design, gaming, music and even space exploration. These applications are nothing new to Intel; what’s new is Intel’s decision to talk about how its systems translate to daily life.

Creating the spot took mcgarrybowen to places like Austria and NASA, and they also hired the musician Kawehi to mix the Fifth Symphony with the company’s jingle. A cross platform campaign, the company wants to show its evolution beyond being just making chips and tech. Via Teresa Herd, their VP-global creative director:

“We have to tell people about all these amazing things Intel has been a part of. When we were working with McGarry, I was like, ‘Did you know that we were in the space shuttle? And the Hubble Space Telescope and Stephen Hawking’s computer?’ Intel’s been part of these huge cultural experiences, and we as a company never talked about them or tried to get credit for them. But we have to let people know. Kids today don’t care about what’s inside — they care about what they get to do with it. That’s been the impetus for the whole campaign.”

Legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog has made a film about the past, present and evolving future of the internet: Lo And Behold: Reveries Of The Connected World:

A provocative and illuminating documentary produced by NETSCOUT, a world leader in real-time service assurance and cyber security, LO AND BEHOLD traces what Herzog describes as “one of the biggest revolutions we as humans are experiencing,” from its most elevating accomplishments to its darkest corners. Featuring original interviews with cyberspace pioneers and prophets such as Elon Musk, Bob Kahn, and world-famous hacker Kevin Mitnick, the film travels through a series of interconnected episodes that reveal the ways in which the online world has transformed how virtually everything in the real world works, from business to education, space travel to healthcare, and the very heart of how we conduct our personal relationships.

From the Guardian’s review:

Funded by cybersecurity firm NetScout, it’s expansive and ambitious, which is probably why Herzog decided to break it up into 10 chapters, each on a facet of the online and tech world. Via a coterie of charming, if sometimes awkward boffins and geeks interviewed in labs or their own garages, Herzog weaves a fantastical tale that tries to explain the online world inhabited by about 3 billion people.

Monocle went in search of new-generation animators who don’t follow the hi-tech pack… via the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and South England, and sat down with them to go behind the scenes with people like Vera van Wolferen, Lucie Sunkova, and Daisy Jacobs. The videos looked at their process, animation techniques and why they favoured non-digital techniques like stop motion.

“There’s a rawness to it, a sort of desperation. And that reminds you that this has been made by someone.”

As the Animation World Network mentioned in 2012, the world has more enough people who can do great tricks with computers, and what animation needs are visionaries and dreamers:

For the past fifteen years, the Holy Grail for most new character animators has been a staff position with one of the major studios – Pixar, DreamWorks, Sony, Blue Sky or Disney. Today’s new animators are encountering a rapidly changing industry landscape that includes entirely new production models. Movies such as Chico and Rita, Rango, Coraline, The Illusionist, and Waltz with Bashir cost much less to make than, say, Brave or Madagascar 3, and they play for more demographically specific audiences. New channels of distribution and exhibition are emerging, and Hollywood’s big studios are feeling the sting that accompanies a mega-budget flop like Mars Needs Moms. Even lofty Pixar is having trouble sustaining its own high creative standard while producing three movies per year on an assembly-line basis.

We can do a better job of preparing the next generation of animators for the industry realities that await them. We can do a better job of mentoring the next Miyazaki, Lasseter or Disney. Based upon my personal observations from interacting with young animators around the world, the schools and universities are graduating too many technicians and not enough artists. An ability to draw, as evidenced by the work in a strong portfolio, is increasingly optional or even irrelevant for admission to many animation-training programs. Granted, the computer has largely replaced the pencil as a primary animation tool over the past twenty years, but drawing skills are a visible marker of aptitude for animation in general. Take that away and you are basically left with analytic computer programmer/operator potential. The increasing numbers of animation technicians that is gathering at industry portals is creating a competitive climate that will drive down entry-level compensation that is, arguably, already too low. Aspiring animators are becoming a bright target for entrepreneurs that want to exploit them.

Dutch production company Studio Smack imagines what your branded dreams might look like when infected by branding (and of course Coca-Cola would be into this new tech first):

We see ads everyday and everywhere. They have become part of our life. While some people try to avoid seeing ads, advertisers keep finding new ways to reach us. However they are unable to reach us when we sleep. Our dreams are the last safe and add-free place, so it seems. But what happens when advertisers have the possibility to enter our dreams? Based on recent developments in brain science and technology this might be possible in the near future. This animated short is an impression of a dream infected by a brand we all know …

The short film was commissioned by MOTI and Dropstuff, deconstructing elements of a major brand (Coca Cola) and adding them into the branded dream in subliminal messages. The curved white on red lines are there, as are the polar bear, and the bubbles – all without mentioning the brand. Before you click on it, turn up the volume – the sound design’s great as well.

About Studio Smack

Studio Smack consists of animators Ton Meijdam, Thom Snels and Béla Zsigmond, all of whom studied at the AKV|St.Joost in Breda (Art Academy), The Netherlands. Their animated films have gained awards at several international festivals, including the Dutch Design Awards, the Netherlands Online Film Festival 2006, and the International Music Video Festival Paris 2015.

This is the first zinnias grown aboard the International Space Station. Via Gizmodo:

Despite fears of over-watering, the crew coaxed the zinnias into a burst of colour in their zero-g vegetable garden.
Zinnias are edible blooming plants that are usually on the easy ends in the spectrum to grow. They’re the second plant to be tested in the space station’s hydroponic VEGGIE lab.
Astronauts taste-tested their previous crop, arugula, last last year.

The orange zinnias were revealed to the world by NASA’s Scott Kelly on Jan 16, and it was a near thing: the zinnias nearly died of mold a few weeks earlier, and the situation was only reversed after NASA botanists on the ground revised their care plan. Unfortunately, the flower was not actually the first grown in space, or even the first flower grown aboard the ISS, despite Scott Kelly’s statement. The first flower grown on the ISS was four years previously, in a private experiment by Don Pettit, and the first flower grown in space was in 1966 aboard the Soviet Union’s biosciences space probe Cosmos 110, which launched in a 22 day uncrewed mission that included plants and a couple of dogs.

Ultimately NASA hopes to supplement astronaut diets with freshly-grown greens, particularly on long haul missions away from Earth, as they not only provide psychological benefits but also assist in atmosphere recycling.

Amazing kinetic sculptures by Anthony Howe via This is Colossal:

[…]powered by wind or motors that cycle continuously through hypnotic motions that resemble something between the tentacles of an octopus and an alien spacecraft. Weighing up to 1,600 lbs (725kg), each artwork is first built digitally to test how it will move and react to the force of wind once fabricated in the real world.

According to the artist,

“Kinetic sculpture resides at the intersection of artistic inspiration and mechanical complexity. The making of one of my pieces relies on creative expression, metal fabrication, and a slow design process in equal parts. It aims to alter one’s experience of time and space when witnessed. It also needs to weather winds of 90 mph and still move in a one mile per hour breeze and do so for hundreds of years.”

His work is not available for commission. Born in Salt Lake City, Anthony Howe attended the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, and subsequently moved on to Cornell University and the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting. At the beginning, he built a house in New Hampshire, painting watercolours, which led to a series of one man shows in Boston. However, he moved on to metal after being inspired by his part time job erecting shelving, and combined it with a previous interest in wind power. His kinetic sculptures have been exhibited in the Middle East and in America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJext1d6KFA

That Zoolander, so hot right now.

Coming off a smash hit surprise launch via Stiller and Wilson in character as Zoolander and Hansel on the Valentino catwalk last year, the Zoolander 2 film has been officially announced, to be released on Feb 11. In the meantime, Zoolander has ramped up its marketing, with hilarious tie-ins from Fiat (above), “Driving While Hot”, and a trailer that mocks and celebrates high fashion ads:

Print ads add to the hilarious marketing spiel so far.

Update

An article in the WSJ titled ‘The New Ad Man: Derek Zoolander’ explained the fierce marketing push:

The release of “Zoolander 2” represents a test case of several converging trends in Hollywood. It was greenlit off the success of the 2001 original’s afterlife on DVD and in consumer products, and it offers a chance for Paramount to make millions by lending out its characters to other brands.

Though Hollywood registered its highest-grossing year of all time in 2015, streaming services and other at-home entertainment have made going to the movies a tougher call for many consumers. That’s put the onus on studios to turn their movies into “can’t-miss” events that must be seen on opening weekend—and not months later on Netflix.