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A new photographic technique by Geoff Tompkinson, Hyperzooming, allows people to experience the exhilaration of travel and travel photography from a video, via stitching together a series of photographs on a special rig + post production. For the above video:
As if on the back of an invisible insect we fly around the sites of this wonderful town in one continuous journey passing through buildings to emerge in different parts of the town, finally ending up on the new viewpoint from Rudolfsturm perched high above the ancient town square. Those of you who know Hallstatt, as well as anyone who watches the video carefully, will appreciate that I have applied a little artistic licence to the geometry of the town in order to seamlessly link the locations. The footage was shot over a two day period but the post production, of course, took considerably longer.
Venice:
And Mexico City!
https://vimeo.com/138779545
More on Tompkinson’s website, where he describes his process:
Most of us are familiar with the use of zoom lenses in video. The focal length of the lens is smoothly changed to either zoom into or out-of a scene. The range of this zoom capability is defined by the focal length range of the lens being used to produce the image. HyperZoom™ is a different form of Zooming into or out-of a shot with virtually no restrictions to the range of the zoom.
Happy Friday! Have this mildly disturbing montage of 80s ads, set to ‘I Ran’.
Still miss the 80s?
Adweek has you covered. We especially like the ones by Coca-Cola and the Mormon Church. From the article:
Grating jingles, DayGlo wardrobes, shrill child actors, cheesy dance montages. If you wanted annoying, you could find it in the TV-commercial breaks of the 1980s. But today, 21 years removed from that decade of regrettable advertising, a few spots from the era do manage to spark a glimmer of misty-eyed nostalgia. AdFreak sifted through the morass and picked 21 such relative bright spots—presented here for your enjoyment. No, these aren’t the best ads of the ’80s, so don’t expect Apple’s “1984” or Wendy’s “Where’s the beef?” We also bypassed enduring earworms like “My Buddy.” These are just ads that, for better or worse, made us smile in looking back at them—a glimpse of a simpler time when, occasionally, it wasn’t so bad when Knight Rider went to commercial.
Still want more? Here are some from Australia in the 80s, just as hilarious, just as retro, still classic. If you’re looking for bad Australian ads from the 80s for the luls though, we’ve also got you covered.
Hilarious ‘Taste the Translation’ ad pits ElaN Languages against Google Translate on a recipe. ElaN’s goal wasn’t really to get people to use its free translator instead of Google’s, but to get people to pay for a professional past a few words/phrases:
Filling up the tires of your car is something you probably do yourself. But replacing a brake disc? That’s a job that is better left to the experts.
The same is true for translation. Feel free to use our free translation tool below to translate one word or word group. But if you need to translate a whole sentence or text it is best to make use of one of our experienced translators from our global network. This way, you can rest assured that your text does not contain any crooked sentences or incorrect words.
Here are the top 3 most viral ads (by shares) for 2015:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnVuqfXohxc
1. Android Friends Furever – 6,432,921 shares. About:
The ad, which was uploaded in February, features unlikely animal pals goofing around with Roger Miller’s song Oo-De-Lally from Disney’s Robin Hood playing in the background. And who wouldn’t share a video of a dog and an elephant, an orangutan and a dog, and even a baby rhinoceros and sheep all playing together?
2. Disney Surprise – 3,943,997 shares – a really memorable wall stunt that played on people’s nostalgia for Disney characters:
The characters were working behind the opaque windows of the “Umbra Penumbra Magic Shop” at the Westfield Sunrise Center in Massapequa. The name of the shop refers to two parts of a shadow.
3. Purina Puppyhood – 3,021,499 shares
“Data analysis of 1,300 ads proves that 2015 was a highly emotional year for video ads,” says Unruly co-CEO and co-founder Sarah Wood. “On the one hand, warmth and happiness shone through, with brands using fluffy pets and simple storylines to melt our hearts and amplify sharing. At the same time, other advertisers aligned themselves with social causes, evoking strong feelings of sadness and inspiration. It’s not that adland has lost its sense of humor this year; it’s just that it’s found a sense of higher purpose.”
More here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=73&v=r6hDsVclRik
Joining on the Star Wars marketing surge is HP, with ads from BBDO New York and 180LA on their “Keep Reinventing” campaign. Ads include asking people to ‘Reinvent Romance’ by building an R2-D2 to deliver a love letter (Really?) and ‘Reinvent Music’ that highlights their laptops. Not really sure if any reinvention actually did happen in any of the ads, but they’re a fun tie in to the upcoming film (17th December!).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=59&v=HuMisIOJWLQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=40&v=ssSRxoZJdGw
About the campaign via FastCoCreate:
According to chief marketing officer Antonio Lucio, the campaign tagline “Keep Reinventing” is much ore than a slogan but a mission for the company to remain relevant. Lucio sees Star Wars a bit like the Olympics. It’s a fantastic opportunity but the brand is also competing against all the others brands who have the same chance. The goal is to make it as memorable and identified with your own brand as much as possible. For HP, the key was to use technology—and Star Wars—as a vehicle for emotion.
“When we looked at the brand, it seemed like HP had more of a brain than a heart,” says Lucio. “And my objective was to bring the heart back into the brand. I fundamentally believe, and numbers will prove, that when the heart commits the brain can only follow. Bringing back an emotional connection to the HP brand is a priority for us.”
The Lab: Decoy is a photography brief with a twist. Created by Canon Australia, it’s an interesting social experiment in how our opinions shape how we judge people before we really get to know them. They wanted to know whether a photograph would be shaped more by the person behind the camera than by what’s in front of it:
The assignment was to shoot the man and capture his true personality. But here’s the catch…Each photographer was given a different version of the man’s life story, including a self-made millionaire, someone who has saved a life, an ex-inmate, a commercial fisherman, a psychic, and a recovering alcoholic.
In reality, all of these life stories are made up…but the photographers didn’t know this.
It’s an interesting social experiment, demonstrating quite clearly how the photographer’s inner vision, bias and perception shapes their eventual creative work, leading into a wider social question over how popular media is often driven by the biases of the media creators themselves. Recently this has popped up in viral social campaigns, particularly in the USA in support of civil rights and the different way minorities are assessed, described and treated by the media.
More about The Lab here.
This hilarious music video for Darwin Deez, ‘The Mess She Made’, was created by aligning Deez’s facial features with currency in real time. It was directed by Oscar Hudson, and the result is gold. Happy Friday!
From the director:
“The idea for the film came about quite a few years ago whilst messing around with the po-faced kings on the Morrocan banknotes after a lazy holiday lunch. I thought it was really funny but I didn’t think it’d ever go beyond that dinner table. When it occurred to me that it would make a great music video I was kinda surprised that no one had done before to be honest.”
About Darwin Deez
Darwin Deez is an American indie band from New York, signed to the label Lucky Number. The group’s frontman Darwin Deez (Darwin Merwan Smith) attended Wesleyan University and previously was a guitarist for Creaky Boards and a rapper. They first started to gain attention as a group in the United Kingdom in 2009, with their debut single “Constellations”, and released their second single, “Radar Detector”, in 2010, which reached #62 in the UK Singles Chart, #5 on the UK Indie Chart. Since then they have released three albums, with a self-titled album in 2010, “Songs for Imaginative People” in 2013, and “Double Down” in 2015.
Mog the Cat, a children’s book character, was featured in 16 books by writer and illustrator Judith Kerr. Mog returns in this hilarious ad for Sainsbury, where it both destroys and saves(?) Christmas. Coinciding with the ad, Kerr is also releasing a new Mog book, “Mog’s Christmas Calamity”, which will sell for 3 pounds, and a toy Mog for 10 pounds. All profits will go towards Save the Children’s efforts to boost UK child literacy.
About Judith Kerr
Judith Kerr, OBE is a German-born British writer and illustrator, best known for her Mog series, The Tiger Who Came for Tea, and the semi-autobiographical When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, a child’s-eye view of World War II. Via the Telegraph:
Kerr’s reputation has soared over the past few years. A singular talent who can write, draw and paint with equal skill, she is up there with the greats – John Burningham, Michael Foreman, Quentin Blake, Shirley Hughes. “I always feel I’m a bit amateurish compared with them because I’m so slow. I take a year over a book. I feel they are more professional than I am – and they’ve done it all their lives. They haven’t messed about doing other things. I’m catching up, you see!”
Bladeless windmills: is this the future of wind energy? Another great idea in the world of clean energy. Let’s all wean off fossil fuels already!
A Spanish company called Vortex Bladeless is proposing a radical new way to generate wind energy that will once again upend what you see outside your car window.
Their idea is the Vortex, a bladeless wind turbine that looks like a giant rolled joint shooting into the sky. The Vortex has the same goals as conventional wind turbines: To turn breezes into kinetic energy that can be used as electricity. But it goes about it in an entirely different way. Instead of capturing energy via the circular motion of a propeller, the Vortex takes advantage of what’s known as vorticity, an aerodynamic effect that produces a pattern of spinning vortices.
More over at Wired.
Marie Wilcox, the last fluent speaker of the Wukchumni language, creates a dictionary to keep it alive.
Like most Native Americans, the Wukchumni did not write their language until recently. Although several linguists documented the grammar of the Wukchumni language in the 20th century, Ms. Wilcox’s dictionary is the longest work of its kind. Ms. Wilcox has also recorded an oral version of the dictionary, including traditional Wukchumni stories like the “How We Got Our Hands” parable featured in the film. The pronunciation of the language, including intricate accents, will be preserved, which will assist future learners of the language.
More at the NYTimes.
About the Wukchumni People
They are a Yokuts tribe of California with about 200 members, living on the Tule River Reservation. Approximately 3,000 years ago, they separated from the main Yokuts group to settle on the eastern fork of the Kaweah River. They were hunter-gatherers, and sometimes traded with the neighboring Paiute people in the Sequoia National Park region. As of 2014, Marie Wilcox (born 1933) is the last native speaker of the Wukchumni language, which was taught to her by her grandparents. When she realized that younger members of the Wukchumni were interested in learning the language, she decided to create the lexical dictionary with her great-grandson.