Blogbook

Amazing Grace

August 5, 2019

Amazing Grace is a highly acclaimed Aretha Franklin documentary that’s going to be screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival this year. We’re looking forward to it. Via Variety:

“Amazing Grace” is a filmed record of the two nights, in January 1972, during which Franklin recorded the gospel performances that became the celebrated live double album “Amazing Grace.” It remains not only the best-selling gospel record of all time, but the best-selling album of Franklin’s 50-year career. She was then at the height of her stardom, with 20 albums and 11 number-one singles (all the iconic hits: “Respect,” “Chain of Fools,” “Think,” etc.) under her belt, and she wanted to do a record that honored the formative gospel roots of her youth.

Warner Bros. hired director Sydney Pollack to film the sessions (this was the early-’70s heyday of the grainy verité concert film), and in “Amazing Grace” we see Pollack wandering around the church, directing the action and at one point holding the camera. But the project wound up getting shelved. There was a severe technical glitch (much of the sound was out of sync with the images), and later, when attempts were made to solve that issue, Franklin herself repeatedly blocked attempts to release the movie. It’s not clear why, but now that it’s been lovingly restored and assembled (the sound is clear as a bell, and in perfect sync), “Amazing Grace” can stand as an essential filmed record of what is undoubtedly one of the greatest gospel performances you’ll ever see.

Influencers: Nothing is Real on the Internet

August 3, 2019

In 2019, as the Disney industrial machine regurgitates a spitfire volley of dead horses in the form of Toy Story 4, a “live” action Lion King movie, yet another Avengers film, yet another Spiderman film, and whatever else they’re planning on inflicting on us once they open Netflix: Disney Edition™ in November, you’d think that the general public is so glutted of glossy CG and airbrushed foreheads that a little unreality on Instagram would pass without comment. In the light of a certain recent Vanity Fair article about surfer mum influencers in Byron Bay though, we feel compelled to say a few things about influencers and influencer culture.

Full disclaimer: Starship use influencers in our work for clients, either directly or through specialist agencies. As a whole, they’re highly committed, on-the-ball small business owners who often have an extremely quick turn-around on briefs. Understand things a little bit more now? Yes, influencers are merely a new(ish) possible extension of your media buy. For them, it’s work. Just like the photographers, public relations people, and artists you might use on a campaign. Do you really think Omega watches are the best after watching a James Bond show? Think that driving an Audi will make you more like Iron Man? If so, we have bad news: advertising and marketing campaigns are all about promoting a particular reality on behalf of our clients. In Starship, we’re firm believers in authenticity and encourage clients to stick to valid statements where possible — if only because it builds trust in your brand. However, all the photography and media that form part of the content of a campaign is always put forward in the best possible light. Blemishes disappear. The light looks warmer and richer. Products are always perfectly positioned. We think of it as HyperAdreality.

HyperAdreality and Influencers

Back to the Byron Bay article. We now know that surfer mum influencers are collectively known as ‘murfers’, a term that we wish we could scrub from our minds. Carina Chocano wrote a cutting article about the murfers in Vanity fair, titled “The Coast of Utopia“, containing gems like:

She still considers her feed her “personal thing,” but there’s something about the stream of photos—the uniform palette of beige and white, ochre and dusty rose, the coordinated clothes, the styled life, the sponsored content, the kids like modern-day Von Trapps—that looks like a massive ad campaign. But for what? Children? Good genes? Good taste? Good luck? In the comments, her fans want to know how she keeps the place so spotless with five kids in the house. (And it is spotless.) They want to know what product she uses in her hair. (Aveda is a partner.) They want to know where she got that dress, that paint colour, those shoes, that life. They want to know her secret.

Opinion naturally split a few ways. There were those who loved the takedown. There were the Byron locals who bemoaned the effects Instagram had on their town:

“Too many people come here thinking it’s some kind of Utopia, when in reality it has just as many negative or other issues as any place,” she says. “An egalitarian, inclusive image is given [by Instagramers and marketers] of a place where you can make your creative dreams come true, raise your kids in domestic beachy, linen bliss.”

And the actual reality?

“Yes, it’s gorgeous. But behind the facade, it’s a big old country town, with all the restrictions and issues to go with that. People come to live here with unrealistic expectations — and often land flat when the truth of life hits. Ask any health professional in town and they will tell you stories of the people who arrive with big ideas and end up suffering from depression because the dream has been shattered, or because Byron Bay wasn’t the answer to their problems. It’s undeniable that a Utopian image is continuing to be sold [and] projected.”

There were people concerned about parent influencers oversharing information about their kids. Which, I mean, I get. I’ve opened Facebook before only to be shown naked videos of my friends’ toddlers in the bath. Why??? Why is something like that even online? There are all sorts of terrible people on the internet. That being said, there were also articles that came out in the murfers’ defence, including a response on SMH:

I know I use Instagram as a place to post pictures I find pretty and share moments that I think my handful of followers might enjoy or relate to. It’s not really real though but, who really wants to see our trips to Woolies anyway?

As a photo-sharing platform with built-in filters, it was designed for us to appreciate each other’s pretty pictures, as well as a form of self-expression and entertainment.

An interesting counter-trend involves some younger influencers “going out of their way to make their photos look worse”. Still, I get why the article has touched a nerve. What I don’t understand is the hate.

Regardless of how you feel about the article (which does make some good points about Australian immigration and native title), I’m not sure whether Adamo and her friends really deserve all the anger, privileged as they definitely are. Why bother so getting angry at some mums who like to post touched-up pictures on the internet? For a lot of them, it’s just a business that they can run from home. Yes, HyperAdreality can be bad for some people — particularly people who have lower self-esteem, tend to hold themselves up to unrealistic body expectations and such. I do know people who feel that social media puts them in a negative place, and I know people who’ve begun to tie in likes and such digital affirmation markers into their sense of self-worth. Flaming other people isn’t the answer though, even if social media can be a corrosive space. It’s why I’m not on Facebook any longer, and why my Instagram is highly curated to contain design, animal photography, and food pictures only. I recommend it.

Cultural Differences

That being said, it’s true that there are influencers who misuse the power of their platforms. There was a recent trending hashtag, #couscousforcomment, deriding food influencers who try to blackmail restaurants for free food for “exposure”. This was both depressing (poor restaurants!) and hilarious in a sad way. As creatives, we’re often asked to give free or heavily discounted work for “exposure”, and we like to respond that this sort of argument won’t work in a restaurant. Turns out it does — for some:

In the UK Mick Smith, a chef who runs three successful venues in St Ives, Cornwall including the Porthminster Beach Cafe, told the Guardian that some approaches he gets from influencers can feel like “blackmail”.

“It’s like people try and blackmail us: ‘We want stuff for free or else we’ll write a bad review.’ It’s a big problem.”

Only this week, a customer who wanted a discounted glass of wine but was made to pay full price took her complaint to social media.

“Within 30 minutes there were hundreds of extra comments on the post, many of them negative,” says Smith. “You feel like you have to monitor every social media thing – people want to take you down.”

A sobering read for people like me and the creative director, who often judge a restaurant on its zomato score before deciding whether to visit. This influencer shakedown isn’t confined to the restaurant industry — it’s also a thing for hotels. The White Moose Cafe, a luxury Dublin hotel, banned all social media influencers after Elle Darby, a YouTuber, asked for a free 5-night stay. The hotel refused in a Facebook post that blanked out the YouTuber’s information, but when people figured out who it was and took to her videos with negative comments, Darby uploaded an emotional video where she broke down in tears. The resulting stoush resulted in the hotel’s decision. While the White Moose Cafe matter was perhaps dramatic in particular, enough to make the news, this issue has been troubling the industry recently:

“Everyone with a Facebook these days is an influencer,” she said. “People say, I want to come to the Maldives for 10 days and will do two posts on Instagram to like 2,000 followers. It’s people with 600 Facebook friends saying, ‘Hi, I’m an influencer, I want to stay in your hotel for 7 days,’” she said. Others send vague one-line emails, like “I want to collaborate with you,”with no further explanation. “These people are expecting five to seven nights on average, all-inclusive. Maldives is not a cheap destination.” She said that only about 10 percent of the requests she receives are worth investigating.

Influencers can be good for a hotel — if they’re professional, and managed. Just like any other asset in your team. Some may even provide extra value:

Zach Benson, who owns a network of travel Instagram accounts and who says he has gotten more than 200 nights for free over the past year and a half, touts his background in digital marketing when he approaches hotels. Along with the traditional Instagram posts and Stories, Benson offers to work with a hotel’s digital marketing arm to improve the brand’s in-house social media accounts.

“We really want to help people and make their companies and hotels better,” he said. “We know that just doing a couple Instagram posts for them isn’t really going to help them that much.” During his travels, Benson hosts boot camps for hotel social media teams, where he trains employees on things like Facebook ads and Instagram promotion.

“I just think a lot of the influencers have entitlement mentality,” Benson said. “A lot of them think about giving the bare minimum.”

Bedwani said that it’s critical that hotels set explicit terms in their deals with influencers. “I know a major brand that opened up and flew in a plane full of influencers,” he said. “Three-quarters of them didn’t even post. It was a major fail from their team.”

As we mentioned at the start, we do work with professional influencers, all of whom have produced stellar work for our clients. As with any contractor, employee, or external agency that a brand might use, there are good ones and not so good ones, highly professional ones and ones who might not add as much value as you’d like. Want to know more? Need help managing your next campaign? Get in touch.

Taco Chronicles

August 2, 2019

Taco Chronicles is Netflix’s new love letter to six iconic tacos. Specific subject matter? Maybe, but we love this show and highly recommend it. Via Eater:

Netflix’s latest culinary docuseries is a celebration of tacos and the people who both make and eat them. The Spanish language series Taco Chronicles, which comes by way of the streaming titan’s Latin American division, offers a look at six styles: al pastor, carnitas, canasta (“basket tacos”), carne asada, barbacoa, and guisado (stews).

Each episode covers the origins of the taco style, the traditional methods of preparation, and notable permutations. While the emphasis is mostly on the old-school versions of each taco, the show does not dismiss newfangled and/or fancy iterations — the carnitas episode even showcases a restaurant that prepares a gyoza version of the stewed pork dish, topped with micro greens. A lot of screentime is also devoted to mini profiles of the taqueros who are considered masters of their styles, as well as the farmers who grow the best ingredients and the craftspeople who make the pots used to cook the food. The show skips around to different regions of Mexico in each episode; popular Los Angeles restaurants Sonoratown and Guerilla Tacos are also briefly profiled in the carne asada and guisado episodes, respectively.

With gorgeous food photography, sweeping drone footage of bustling cities, dramatic scoring, and a format that mixes commentary from food experts with short profiles of chefs and restaurateurs, Taco Chronicles does feel quite a bit like Chef’s Table and its excellent new spinoff Street Food. The big difference here is that Taco Chronicles also has omnipresent narration from actors personifying the tacos.

Racist Branding and Sushi Pizza

August 1, 2019

When I sat down for lunch in one of Melbourne’s most popular fusion restaurants and saw Engrish in its branding, it felt like a kick in the gut. The most egregious, on the business card: “Sum-Ting-Wong? Let Mr. M know and we fix.”

I live in the land of the tastefully plated smashed avocado. As one of the most hipster cities in the world, Melbourne is politically also the most progressive city in Australia. During the vote for same-sex marriage, inner-city Melbourne electorates came out in force for equality at 83.7% in favour, compared to a 61.6% national average. There’s a good chance that our next mayor is a Green politician. Melbourne has been crowned the “world’s most liveable city” for seven years.

Australia isn’t a post-racial utopia, to say the least. You don’t even need to look beyond the last few months. Coverage of crime in Melbourne has been increasingly racialised, creating a ginned up scare about so-called “African crime gangs” rampaging Mad-Max-style through the city, even though the Victorian police has said that gang violence is not growing. Historically marginalised, Indigenous Australians die younger and at higher rates than non-Indigenous Australians–the life expectancy gap is 10 years. And don’t get me started on Senator Pauline Hanson.

And yet. This restaurant is in Windsor, a very hipster district even for treehugger inner-Melbourne, close to affluent residential zones. Despite its colonial-era name, the food that Windsor is famous for is diverse. There were a few other Asian people in the same restaurant. A Malaysian friend recommended it to me. And as I’ve mentioned, the restaurant itself is wildly popular. The last time I’d tried to get in after watching a film in the heritage cinema down the road, I was told the wait for a table was 2 hours.

Maybe I should’ve known before even sitting down. The restaurant in question, after all, is Mr Miyagi. A fusion restaurant owned by non-Asian Australians, it’s named after one of the most iconic Asian characters in 80s American cinema. The rolling effect of the legacy of the Mr Miyagi character has been variously documented, including within the actor Pat Morita’s own obituary in the New York Times:

“But still, it bother me Miyagi-san so wise, but find it hard use articles, pronouns when talk.”

Generations of Asian schoolkids outside Asia have grown up tormented by that “wax on, wax off” catchphrase. As someone whose grandmothers could not speak English, I hate it when others make fun of the broken accents of people who try. In 2018, in the most progressive city in Australia, why is racist branding not just acceptable but profitable? It isn’t even limited to the card. It’s on the menu too.

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Maybe it’s something about Windsor. If you’ve been looking at the news, you might have seen the backlash against Sash. Sash Restaurant is a “sushi pizza” fusion joint in Windsor, again owned by non-Asians. It also has a racialised menu, and while its newly opened joint in Sydney closed, it’s still open for business in Melbourne:

Sash blamed closure on “overpaid” workers, among other things. This elicited the usual Twitter derision.

There’s also this place in Abbotsford:

Hilarious.

Racist Branding and the Wrong Sort of Cultural Tenancy

Thanks to glowing reviews on Eater, I recently got hooked on David Chang’s Ugly Delicious on Netflix. I binge-watched it. I even got my senior citizen parents to watch it. Though I don’t fully agree with some of the points raised in the show, I love it.

During the “Fried Rice” episode in the show, David mentions that Chinese people are the most food-obsessed people on the planet. It’s true. I’m Singaporean and ethnically Chinese. Despite being from a tiny country, I’m used to encountering Singaporeans in random restaurants around the world. I think Asian people, in general, are food-obsessed. Look at the recent #rendanggate stoush that consumed four different countries and several politicians. In some Asian countries, some recipes and chefs are considered national treasures. Once we were colonised for our strategic locations and/or our resources. Perhaps it’s inevitable that our flavours are now the most appropriated on the planet.

Take Masterchef again, for example. #Rendanggate aside, I do like watching the Masterchef format. In Australia, it’s feel-good popcorn TV fun. Yet as Asian food, in general, becomes more trendy, with each new season of Masterchef Australia I think I’ll play a drinking game. Every time a non-Asian person says they know ‘Asian flavours’, are going to use ‘Asian vegetables’, or love ‘Asian [insert noun here]’, drink up. Will the show be pulled off the air before I damage my liver? Stay tuned. At least I’d be able to unironically enjoy the show if I’m not sober. Maybe it’s the masochist in me, but I still religiously tune in every week, watching non-Asian judges smile and praise the Asianness of the contestant’s Asianly flavoured Asianish dishes while I grow ulcers. A previous non-Asian Masterchef Australia contestant, Matt Sinclair, even opened a fusion restaurant in Queensland that supposedly highlights their “spirit and passion for Asian cuisine and culture”, called Sum Yung Guys. I kid you not. At least last year’s winner was a Singaporean-born Indian man, Sashi Cheliah.

Don’t get me wrong. I like fusion food. Thanks to our countries’ often colonial past, some Asian food is fusion. Once, I sat down to lunch with my parents in Yet Con Restaurant on Purvis Street in Singapore. We ordered its famous, fragrant Hainanese Chicken Rice, as well as a side of Cantonese Pork Chop. Crowded knee-to-knee in the tiny shop, my dad laughed as the dish arrived on a plastic plate: pieces of pork breaded and stir-fried with vegetables. “Last time when the British came, they told local cooks, ‘I want to eat pork chop!’ But we Chinese didn’t know what they mean by pork chop. So we took a piece of pork and chopped it up into small pieces and fried it with everything. Hai,” he said, smiling, “we used to cook for [Westerners]. Now they cook for us.” Fusion was wedged into our cultures by the colonisers. Personally, I’m fine eating fusion food cooked by whoever. If it’s delicious, I’d probably be back.

Most of the time.

If fusion is so widespread within Asian culture itself, when isn’t it okay for others to “steal like an artist”, to quote Austin Kleon? In the fried chicken episode of Ugly Delicious, a white American fried chicken restaurant owner is asked about appropriation. He mentions having to be a respectful tenant of the (more marginalised) culture that you’re borrowing from. Is it respectful to have Engrish branding along with a menu loaded with kimchi and edamame, in a restaurant full of non-Asian staff? I don’t think so. There’s even an explicitly “borrowed” item in pride of place on Mr Miyagi’s menu. It’s a David Chang dish: his ramen gnocchi.

Stealing an Asian chef’s dish and featuring it on a menu that laughs at Asian accents? Hilarious.

Your English is Really Good

Fifteen years ago, while playing online MUDs (yes, I’m old), non-Asians would often say, “Oh, you’re from Singapore? Which part of China is that?” Nowadays, you’ve probably been to our beautiful and efficient airport, even if you didn’t step outside to get slapped in the face by the humidity. Singapore has an advanced, universal healthcare system, is highly affluent and developed, multilingual, is surrounded by large and less affluent neighbours, and sadly, has a zero refugee intake. I know what you’re thinking: in a way, we’re like an Asian version of Wakanda. (Not true, by the way.) Despite this, I still get “Your English is Really Good!” from well-meaning people who mean it as a compliment. “Well of course,” I want to say, instead of the fake smile I plaster on, “I grew up in a country with a world-class education system that has an English-based curriculum. I’ve published a novel and over 10 short stories with well-regarded magazines.”

Look, slang aside, Engrish is real, you might say. Some of you Asians don’t speak good English.

Hey man, we don’t laugh at your attempts to speak Japanese via Duolingo and put it into our branding. We endure your often terrible plot device attempts to speak Mandarin and other Chinese dialects in Hollywood films. Trying to learn another language is a good thing. Everyone’s going to be shaky at the start. To laugh at someone who speaks poor English when English isn’t even their first language is mean. Besides, look closer at who you’re laughing at and why. Do you laugh at European tourists struggling with English? Or do you think, in contrast, that French, Italian accents are ‘sexy’? Many Asians treat genuine attempts to learn and speak our languages with patience and delight. It’s a pity the sentiment isn’t always returned. It’s depressing when derision-bloated stereotypes are run for laughs and profit.

Confession: I’m not good at math. Dishonour on my ancestors.

Just Don’t Think About It As “Asian”

Once, when my father visited me in Melbourne, I trolled him by taking him to an “Asian” restaurant. It was Spice Temple in Crown, run by Neil Perry, a “Modern Chinese” restaurant focused on regional Chinese cuisine. Going inside was like descending into a gentrified opium den. It was dimly lit, with Asian-ish furniture, and the serving staff were all white, dressed in cheongsams. I took a sneaky photo at the severe frown on my dad’s face as we sat on plush red velvet and black furniture.

“I thought you said this was a Chinese restaurant,” he said.

“It is. Look at the menu. Sichuan pork rib,” I said, stifling my giggles, trying to sneak another photo of his suffering.

We ordered. The dishes weren’t that bad. In the end, in magnanimous recognition of this, my dad said, “If I don’t think of it as ‘Asian’, it’s all right.” Nowadays, before my family flies down to Melbourne, he’d often tell me to book specific restaurants. I don’t think my dad’s approach is the right one in this case. Sure, a restaurant like Mr Miyagi isn’t aiming to be Asian, but it isn’t aiming to be respectful either. It isn’t something I can easily ignore. Instead, I think of my mom. She likes to tell me, “Don’t get mad, get even!” Each time we speak out, we build a little more social capital. Maybe I can build enough to get a restaurant to change its branding.

Is Racist Branding Funny to You?

In the neighbouring land of many sheep and Lord of the Rings, a Western-owned fusion Asian restaurant in Christchurch called Bamboozle recently came under fire on social media. It had a menu that included, among other things, a dish called “Chirri Garrik An Prawn Dumpring”. New Zealanders declared that they wouldn’t go to a place with racial tropes on the menu. Heartening as that was to see, it looks so far like the restaurant probably isn’t going to change its menu. And unsurprisingly, it’s also had its defenders. A poll on Stuff.co.nz with 34.3k votes was 43% “Yes, it’s racist and insensitive” and 58% “No. Lighten up, it’s funny.”

So funny.

Not having racist branding is actually not hard. Serious talk here. We recommend thinking your project over each time and looking closely at where your humour comes from. Are you deriving “humour” by mocking an entire group of people or their culture? If so, maybe don’t do it. It isn’t called having to be PC, it’s called good business. When you own a business that lives and dies on reviews and word of mouth, do you really want to alienate whole swathes of your customers before you even get started? Think about it. Or maybe just employ an agency that isn’t rooted in the 60s. We can help.

Still, count me surprised if the owners of Mr Miyagi bother to issue an apology on their own steam, let alone change the branding. Other Asians have already tried complaining after a post about the place was spread on an Asian Facebook group. They hear us, but they don’t care, despite getting reviews on Yelp and other sites complaining about the language on their menu. That tonally ugly business card is still handed out at the end of each meal, beautifully typeset. I could have said something to the serving staff at the end of the meal, but it wasn’t their fault. To live as an Asian person in Australia, it’s sometimes easier to fake a smile when someone asks you how the meal was, in front of a tray of racist business cards.

I hope they change. I’d like to go back. The cheesecake was almost perfect.

Image from Sash Japanese, Urbanlist.

Crayola's Colourful New Ad

August 1, 2019

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

Crayola’s colourful new ad is about how you could transform your notebooks with Crayola’s range of markers and other school supplies.

Old Spice: Next Episode

July 31, 2019

Old Spice has a new ad called Next Episode, pushing their New Swagger product. It’s as funny as ever, and has already gone viral. Via their YouTube description:

SPOILER ALERT: The two friends make it out of the apartment alive, reach the car before they get a ticket, and then go on to have a really memorable night out. Despite being “off carbs”, Derek decided to have a nacho, of course grabbing the most loaded of the mound. Powered up by a dizzying mix of fried tortilla, melted cheese, and Old Spice Swagger, he then decided to stick a quarter into Alien Gateway 2. A large crowd gathered around the game, and with their enthusiastic support, he then proceeded to beat the high score. Both men learned a valuable lesson in friendship that evening. Six years down the line, both men get married and raise wonderful families. Despite the strenuous commitments of fatherhood and middle management, the guys still find time to go bowling together once a month. Derek eventually dies in his sleep at the ripe old age of 102. It was a happy funeral, not one of those dry, somber affairs. Derek brought joy to a lot of people’s lives. None more so than his close group of friends that he somehow managed to stay in touch with after college. This long-lasting friendship could be attributed to the confidence-boosting scent of Old Spice Swagger. This could easily be construed as “”a preposterous exaggeration of the truth for commercial benefit”” but we maintain that this 300+ word YouTube description is mere puffery. Please keep the information you’ve gained from this spoiler to yourself, so as not to ruin the story for people who haven’t yet seen the commercial. Thank you.

The Rise of Evil Photoshop

July 30, 2019

Photoshop isn’t always bad, I tell myself as I open CNN and notice that the latest news involve Trump appearing in front of a doctored Presidential seal featuring a Russian-styled two-headed eagle holding some golf clubs. Given it was for a conservative student summit, apparently it was all a mistake thanks to time crunch, but heads rolled and I laughed. Photoshop is a fun program. For many young designers, it’s usually their first introduction to Adobe Creative Suite — in design school, everyone knew how to use it. There are always funny Photoshopping events that run on Kotaku and other sites. That being said, it’s often used for evil or outright illegal purposes.

If you’ve been following the news, you might have seen that certain people thought it would be funny to make an app which auto-undresses women. Just women, mind you. If a guy’s picture was put into the app, it just added boobs to it. Naturally, the app promptly went viral, because there are a lot of evil bastards in the world. Via Vice:

“We created this project for users’ entertainment months ago,” he wrote in a statement attached to a tweet. “We thought we were selling a few sales every month in a controlled manner… We never thought it would become viral and we would not be able to control traffic.”

When I spoke to Alberto in an email Wednesday, he said that he had grappled with questions of morality and ethical use of this app. “Is this right? Can it hurt someone?” he said he asked himself. “I think that what you can do with DeepNude, you can do it very well with Photoshop (after a few hours of tutorial),” he said. If the technology is out there, he reasoned, someone would eventually create this.

Since then, according to the statement, he’s decided that he didn’t want to be the one responsible for this technology.

“We don’t want to make money this way,” the statement said. “Surely some copies of DeepNude will be shared on the web, but we don’t want to be the ones to sell it.” He claimed that he’s just a “technology enthusiast,” motivated by curiosity and a desire to learn. This is the same refrain the maker of deepfakes gave Motherboard in December 2017: that he was just a programmer with an interest in machine learning. But as the subsequent rise of fake revenge porn created using deepfakes illustrated, tinkering using women’s bodies is a damaging, sometimes life-destroying venture for the victims of “enthusiasts.”

“The world is not yet ready for DeepNude,” the statement concluded. But as these victimizing algorithms and apps show, there is no simple solution for technology like DeepNudes, and the societal attitudes that erase women’s bodily autonomy and consent.

There are a few takeaways from this. Firstly, I think it’s hilarious that Alberto thought he was creating an app “motivated by curiosity and a desire to learn” when it could destroy the lives of women with fake revenge porn. It’s either disingenuous — an “Uh oh, I now realize I could be sued for this!” or extremely ignorant, a “I’m so privileged I didn’t realize this might be a problem” thing. Secondly, it’s true that anyone with Photoshop could do what DeepNude does. If you pirate or buy Photoshop and if you invest time learning how to use the app (It WILL take more than a few hours), you can indeed create fake nude images that you could spread around to get someone fired / hurt them enough to drive them to depression or suicide / worse. Not to mention that anything that gets on the internet will likely stay on the internet.

What Can Victims of Evil Photoshop Do?

Depending on what the problem is, there might be a legal recourse. Many countries have a revenge porn law on the books. In Australia, there’s both a civil and criminal recourse:

“When we’ve spoken with people who’ve been individual victims of this type of behaviour — which is terrible behaviour, obviously — what they say is what they really want is some ability to really quickly compel that person to stop doing it and to compel people who’ve received it to take it down if it’s posted on Facebook or to remove it if it’s been texted or emailed to someone,” Porter told 6PR on Thursday afternoon.

“And so we’ve set up this civil penalty regime, which basically allows for this really quick take-down, if you like, of that type of posting. In addition to which, we’ve looked at the existing offences and we’ve toughened them up, so that it will now be the case that if you send an image which we have defined as a private sexual image of someone and you do that in a way that’s unreasonable — including, obviously, consideration as to whether or not the person consented — then you can face a penalty of five years.

“If you do that and you’ve been the subject of three or more of these civil penalty orders — which is the regime that sits underneath it — then you can be guilty of an offence with a penalty up to seven years.”

For everything else, things are more complicated. Deep fakes, or computer-generated replicas of a person saying or doing things they hadn’t said, already exist. In May 2018, a Belgian political party, Socialistische Partij Anders, or sp.a, created a deep fake video of Trump purportedly offering climate change advice to the people of Belgium. They’d assumed that the poor quality of the fake would alert people to the fact that it was a parody video. Naturally, it didn’t. The video went viral and sp.a went into damage control. If even a small-scale deep fake could damage our already fragile news systems, it could do worse. Via the Guardian:

Citron and Chesney are not alone in these fears. In April, the film director Jordan Peele and BuzzFeed released a deep fake of Barack Obama calling Trump a “total and complete dipshit” to raise awareness about how AI-generated synthetic media might be used to distort and manipulate reality. In September, three members of Congress sent a letter to the director of national intelligence, raising the alarm about how deep fakes could be harnessed by “disinformation campaigns in our elections”.

The specter of politically motivated deep fakes disrupting elections is at the top of Citron’s concerns. “What keeps me awake at night is a hypothetical scenario where, before the vote in Texas, someone releases a deep fake of Beto O’Rourke having sex with a prostitute, or something,” Citron told me. “Now, I know that this would be easily refutable, but if this drops the night before, you can’t debunk it before serious damage has spread.”

The problem, the article noted, wasn’t even whether people could or could not easily ID whether a video was fake, or if there was tech that could tell if it was fake:

Indeed, as the fake video of Trump that spread through social networks in Belgium earlier this year demonstrated, deep fakes don’t need to be undetectable or even convincing to be believed and do damage. It is possible that the greatest threat posed by deep fakes lies not in the fake content itself, but in the mere possibility of their existence.

This is a phenomenon that scholar Aviv Ovadya has called “reality apathy”, whereby constant contact with misinformation compels people to stop trusting what they see and hear. In other words, the greatest threat isn’t that people will be deceived, but that they will come to regard everything as deception.

Recent polls indicate that trust in major institutions and the media is dropping. The proliferation of deep fakes, Ovadya says, is likely to exacerbate this trend.

In other words, no, there’s nothing much we can do to prevent the increasing sophistication of evil Photoshop and its kin. It’s all very well to ask people to apply an extra-healthy dose of cynicism and scepticism to anything that appears too good to be true, but in today’s time-sensitive world, that’s a hard ask.

A Retouching Law

Altering images to remove small flaws is nothing new. We do it ourself — retouching images to make them more beautiful. I’ve worked before in a studio with mostly fashion clients where they’d regularly lengthen the legs, lengthen the neck, change the hair, the nails — all in post-production. The “It can all be fixed in post” attitude is filtered in from design school. A classmate once told me in third year that while in first year he would have reshot an image with an error in the set, in third year it was already just easier to erase it in post rather than fiddle with cameras and lighting.

When retouching is taken to extremes, however, that’s what I’d call Strangely Socially Acceptable Evil Photoshop. Look at the image above. It’s of the same model: Filippa Hamilton. See the problem? The image on the left drew criticism over its alteration to impossible body standards.

The Rise of Evil Photoshop

Such standards cause lasting damage or worse on people. In 2007, Hila Elmaliach, a well-known model, died of complications from anorexia at age 34. She was 5’8, and weighed less than 22kg at her death. She’d developed eating disorders when she’d become a model at 13 years old. The American Medical Association also released a statement in 2011 about image alteration:

“The appearance of advertisements with extremely altered models can create unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image. In one image, a model’s waist was slimmed so severely, her head appeared to be wider than her waist. We must stop exposing impressionable children and teenagers to advertisements portraying models with body types only attainable with the help of photo editing software.”

Israel has now passed legislation requiring models to have a BMI of at least 18.5, and there’s legislation in the books about retouching in some countries. Via Pixelz:

In France, a law that went into effect in October of 2017 requires a “photographie retouchée” label on photos that have been digitally altered to make a model’s silhouette narrower or wider; it also requires an every other year health exam for models, to medically certify they are healthy enough to work.

Getty images has now banned “any creative content depicting models whose body shapes have been retouched to make them look thinner or larger,” and there’s also been celebrity backlash on the issue:

The Things We Do

People have less and less of an appetite for extremely retouched stuff. American Eagle’s lingerie line, Aerie, had a campaign celebrating women of all body types:

It resulted in a 20% increase in sales in 2015. And of course, there’s Dove’s heavy push towards body positivity, in award-winning ads that have raised the profile of its products. So how much retouching (if any) is OK, and how much is not? In our opinion, retouching minor things like dirt, temporary blemishes, lighting and such is fine. These edits don’t fundamentally change what the image is, they just change the basic presentation. Respect the model and respect your audience, and as with every ad/marketing content out there, create it while trying to do no evil. That’s the best advice we can put forward in this day and age. Want to know more? Get in touch.

Image by Alex Wong / Getty Images / as seen on CNN

Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit

July 30, 2019

Taika Waititi’s anti-hate film, Jojo Rabbit, involves a boy whose imaginary friend is Adolf Hitler. It’s hilarious, but we knew it would be. Naturally, the film has also already gone full meta. Via Indiewire:

The account has posted its own spin on the infamous “Hitler Meme,” a 15-year-old viral parody taken from the climactic scene of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s controversial 2004 German-language film “Downfall,” about the last days of Herr Wolf. If you haven’t seen the meme, and here’s a topical example, it’s taken from a scene wherein Hitler bemoans his enemies, shrivels into a crybaby and more or less accepts defeat.

The “Jojo Rabbit” twist on the meme, which you can check out below, sees Hitler first decrying the meme itself, as well as Waititi’s status as a “Polynesian Jew,” before commending Waititi’s 2017 mega-hit “Thor: Ragnarok.” “Now that’s a movie.”

“Jojo Rabbit” is set to world-premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this September before Fox Searchlight opens the film in the fray of awards season on October 18. The cast includes Scarlett Johansson as the boy’s mother, Rosie, who decides to shelter a young Jewish girl, played by “Leave No Trace” breakout Thomasin McKenzie. Rounding out the supporting cast are Sam Rockwell, Rebel Wilson, “Game of Thrones” Emmy nominee Alfie Allen and “Extras” star/producer Stephen Merchant. The film is based on Christine Leunens’ 2008 novel “Caging Skies.”

Serena Williams Trick Shots

July 29, 2019

Serena Williams performs a number of trick shots in this bonkers video, including facing off against multiple guys and performing a dunk. Via Stuff.NZ:

Williams was hitting against the five members of the trick shot team Dude Perfect, who have a massive worldwide following for their videos.

At one stage, all five were gathered together trying to return a serve from Williams with little success. When one did, Williams – who lost the recent Wimbledon women’s final to Simona Halep – smashed the return back at him and struck him with the ball.

Convenience and the Environment

July 27, 2019

As the general public grows increasingly engaged in a weird mea culpa over plastic straws — nevermind that plastic straws are only a tiny part of the problem and that people with disabilities need them — in Melbourne, I can sip my overpriced orange juice at a cafe with my steel straw and pretend that I’m not contributing the problem each time I buy takeaway food, or things to cook with from a weekly shop, or even a cup of coffee on the go. Convenience is defeating our commitment to the environment and we all know it. “But I put my plastic and stuff into recycling!” you might say. Well, if you’ve been reading the news, you’d know that Australia’s attempt to “recycle” by shipping its dirty plastic to poor third world countries instead of setting up an actual homegrown recycling program has been a slow-moving crisis that seems to have lost major traction in the popular zeitgeist, even though it’s about to hit a new level of trash fire as “recycler” SKM prepares to go into administration:

Beleaguered recycling company SKM has warned that up to 400,000 tonnes a year of paper, glass and plastic could go to landfill if it folds, triggering a capacity crunch at Victoria’s major tips. The Melbourne-based company has contracts with more than 30 Victorian councils to process kerbside recycling, but is being pursued for millions of dollars in debt and is reportedly preparing to go into voluntary administration within days.

Awesome. Given the crisis, is there still a point recycling, you might ask? Do those coloured bins still even mean anything? What can brands do?

Convenience is the Worst

A lot of the “recycling” that ends up in our recycling can’t be recycled because it’s contaminated. Before you start feeling guilty about the last yoghurt cup you threw into recycling that wasn’t washed, recycling systems can cope with leftover food in containers. Washing it out is just going to waste water. That being said, according to Sustainability Victoria, there are still things that we shove into recycling that we really shouldn’t be:

  • Soft plastics including shopping bags, cling wrap and soft plastic packaging and wrappers. Gather these separately and find out where to recycle these in your community, such as at your local supermarket.
  • Clothing cannot be processed at recycling centres, so donate wearable clothing to a local charity instead, or reuse as rags around the home.
  • Keep items out of plastic bags. This one is easy: just bin it – don’t bag it! All recycling items should be loose in the bin. If they are in a plastic bag, the whole lot has to be ditched.
  • Leave green waste out of the recycling bin. If you have a green bin, put all your grass clippings, prunings and garden waste in there.
  • Electronic-waste – this includes any electrical items, phones, cables, batteries and computers. E-waste recycling might be in place in your area. Check with your local council about what’s available near you.

Yes. Goddamned plastic bags. We should’ve just banned single-use plastic bags by now — other countries have done it — but given the crying fit customers went through when Coles and Woolies got rid of it, I can see why it still hasn’t yet been phased out in Australia. In any case, if you’re a consumer, stop with the single-use bags. You can get cornstarch ones that are bio-degradable and work just as well, so get on that.

If you’re a brand, well. The biggest producers of plastic in the world are brands. According to Greenpeace, it’s:

  1. Coca-Cola
  2. PepsiCo
  3. Nestlé
  4. Danone
  5. Mondelez International
  6. Procter & Gamble
  7. Unilever
  8. Perfetti van Melle
  9. Mars Incorporated
  10. Colgate-Palmolive

RIP. We’ve probably all used products from these companies in our lifetime. Probably more than once. Maybe even daily. (Confession: I did have to look up Perfetti van Melle. They own Mentos and Chupa Chups, among many other confectionery brands). If you’re a brand with plastic packaging, maybe think about whether it can get phased out for something else. We understand. Plastic’s an easy solution. We’ve had clients whose products are wrapped in plastic because it’s just the best way of keeping the product fresh before it hits shelves. It’s a nice, cheap, and yeah, convenient way to show a product while protecting it. That being said, the industry won’t move unless brands are willing to move.

A Hunger for Something New

I like going to the Big Vegan Market. It’s not only because of the free chocolate samples, which sadly are growing less and less available over time. I like looking at all the ways people are trying to get around disposables, from selling plastic-free combs and toothbrushes to selling reusable sanitary napkins (wtf lol). Every year, the Vegan Market is massively attended, and that can’t just be because a lot of people are into alternative plant products and weirdly spongy egg/dairy-free baked goods. There definitely is a hunger in Melbourne for something new. People are willing to change — eventually. There’s a growing consciousness that this earth is all we’ve got, and there isn’t going to be spaceships moving everyone to Mars. Everyone’s more or less gotten used to the bagless checkouts in Coles and Woolies. Steel straws are everywhere. You can’t get disposable bags in Queen Victoria Market or in South Melbourne Market. A brand that’s willing to get ahead of the curve with something new in terms of its packaging is going to be ahead of the pack. If you’re a brand that’s willing to innovate, get in touch. We’d like to help.

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