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Shirkers is an oscar-nominated documentary by Sandi Tan, also called a love-letter to 90s Singapore. It features a strange story of theft. Via the Guardian:
Shirkers is about a kidnapping. A strange kidnapping. One in which the precious cargo held hostage isn’t a person, but a film.
The Sundance award-winning documentary tells the story of Los Angeles-based, Singapore-born film-maker Sandi Tan, whose first feature, made when she was still a teenager, was stolen before it could be completed. Twenty years later, when she was miraculously reunited with the unseen footage, Tan decided to return to Singapore and revisit the making – and losing – of the film that haunted her for decades.
The resulting documentary is a collage of interviews with the people who worked on the project, footage from the original film, and letters, drawings and photos from Tan’s youth. It’s an annotated love letter to the people and places she left behind. After it premiered at Sundance in January, the New Yorker described it as “an exemplary work of counter-lives and alternative histories, intimate self-portraiture and cultural reconstruction, hard-won empathy and painful reconciliation”.
Kitbull is one of Pixar’s Sparkshorts, an incredibly cute short animated film that looks at the growing friendship between a pitbull and a kitten. Via the Independent:
Pixar has released a new 2D animated short entitled Kitbull.
Its story depicts the unlikely friendship between a stray kitten and an abused pit bull, set in San Francisco’s Mission District.
The short is directed by Rosana Sullivan and produced by Kathryn Hendrickson. In a video that accompanies the short, Sullivan said: ”To be fully honest, it started from a cat video … I loved watching cat videos in times of stress.”
“At first, I just wanted to draw something that made me feel good and was fun, but it evolved into something more personal to me eventually.”
“Growing up, I was always very sensitive and very shy, and had actually a lot of trouble making connections, making friendship,” she continued. “So I related to this kitten because it never really stepped outside of its comfort zone to be vulnerable and make a connection.”
The short is part of Pixar’s new animation project, titled SparkShorts, which is intended to help give new voices and artists and a platform.
“The SparkShorts program is designed to discover new storytellers, explore new storytelling techniques, and experiment with new production workflows,” Pixar president Jim Morris said.
“These films are unlike anything we’ve ever done at Pixar, providing an opportunity to unlock the potential of individual artists and their inventive filmmaking approaches on a smaller scale than our normal fare.”
The BBC’s TV production of His Dark Materials has come out with a short trailer with a strong cast, including Dafne Keen and James McAvoy. Via the Verge:
The BBC has released a brief teaser for its upcoming adaptation of Philip Pullman’s classic fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials, giving us a first look at the series and its characters. The teaser doesn’t say when the series will premiere, only that it’s “coming soon” to BBC One.
The BBC greenlit the show for an eight-episode season back in 2015, and ordered a second season last fall. The series is set in an alternate world in which people are accompanied by manifestations of their souls, shapeshifting animals called daemons. In the first novel, The Golden Compass, a girl named Lyra Belacqua (played by Logan star Dafne Keen) travels to the arctic to search for a friend who has been kidnapped. There, she discovers that a major church has been studying a phenomenon called Dust, an elementary particle that imparts consciousness in humans, something that the organization deems heretical.
This short teaser gives us a bit of what to expect for the series, showing off Keen’s Lyra, as well as the rest of the cast — Ruth Wilson as Church agent Mrs. Coulter, James McAvoy as Lord Asriel, Lin-Manuel Miranda as aeronaut Lee Scoresby, Clarke Peters as Dr Carne. Interestingly, there’s no sign anywhere of any of the characters’ daemons, and only the briefest of glimpses of the story’s trademark magical item, the alethiometer.
HBO also released a trailer for the upcoming releases it has this spring. Nestled amongst the glimpses of the final season of Game of Thrones and Watchmen is a couple of snippets of footage for the show (at the 0:58 mark), indicating that it will come to the US, although the network didn’t reveal a date.
NGL we kinda miss Daniel Craig as Lord Asriel, but we’re looking forward to this.
Black Sheep is an Oscar short documentary nominee about Cornelius Walker, whose life changed after the death of Damilola Taylor. Via the Guardian:
Growing up on an estate in Camberwell, south London, in the late-90s, I was raised around different cultures. My mum is Nigerian, my dad half-Sierra Leonean. But my last name is Walker and so, even as a child, I felt different – a bit left out when it came to the Nigerians: in jest, they’d say, “Oh, your last name’s Walker, that means you’ll be able to get a job.”
I was always a quiet kid, sensitive; more so than my two younger brothers. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was somehow unwanted. My mum would make fun of me because I was chubby and family members would call me ugly. They weren’t serious, but it hurt. One time, my mum and aunties got me to try on clothes in front of them – they didn’t fit and they all laughed. That messed up how I saw myself. I still have bad posture because I used to walk with my head down low.
When I started secondary school in Peckham, there were Latinos, Asians, Nigerians, Caribbeans, Eritreans, Somalians and, obviously, white kids, too. It was so diverse that I honestly didn’t even know what racism was. I thought it existed only in the United States. But everything changed in 2000, on the day of Damilola Taylor’s death.
I can still remember walking home after playing football with friends, going to get chicken and chips on the way. All I could see was the blue lights flashing. As I got closer, I could see police tape across the street. I looked at one policeman and he told me: “A kid died.” I took the long way home, got in and saw my mum on the floor, crying. In my head I was thinking, “Mum, we didn’t even know this person.”
If you’re mired in the particularly tiny, shiny bubble of the internet populated by designers, you might have noticed that Zara has rebranded. Rebrands aren’t unusual nowadays, particularly for fashion brands. Instead of taking the usual step of rebranding into a featureless sans-serif, Zara chose instead to move to a more beautiful, taller serif that would reflect an attempt to move towards a more luxury-esque market. The only problem was their apparently inexplicable decision to consider kerning optional. Unsurprisingly, the internet had a field day:
That is the worst piece of type I’ve seen in years. Was this done by one of those new robots that will replace humans?
— erik spiekermann (@espiekermann) January 26, 2019
Zara have updated their logo. pic.twitter.com/GhhQziNV1D
— Fabio ✌︎⁂ (@fffabs) January 26, 2019
If you’re one of those fashion-unconscious people who read this far without knowing with Zara is, I probably don’t know you. Zara is a Spanish fast-fashion brand, aka one of those cheap-ish brands proliferating everywhere in the world which try to get you to buy cheap-ish clothes that will break apart or discolour in a few years so you’d have to pop by and buy some more. There are lots of other brands in this space, like Uniqlo, Sportsgirl, FCUK, and Giordana, all of which occupy various spots on the sliding scale of cost. Zara is kind of on the higher-ish end of this scale, which is probably why they’ve tried pushing towards a more luxury look. Luxury-ish. Like its other fast-fashion brands, Zara is bad for the environment, bad for people in emerging economies, and they also tend to steal designs from independent artists. If just thinking about all this has started to make you mildly depressed, welcome to late-stage capitalism.
The rebrand was by Baron & Baron, in a “collaboration” between French art director Fabien Baron for the brand’s Spring/Summer campaign. Brand marks don’t live by themselves — they exist to be expressed across collateral and other aspects of brand communication. In this aspect, the branding doesn’t look too bad:
The serif is graceful and elegant and does look like something that a high fashion brand or magazine would use. It’s still readable. And now it’s memorable… for the wrong/right reasons. It breaks type rules and it’s visually ugly but it works. Is there a problem?
Life is already ugly, why make it uglier
In August, Burberry tapped renowned designer Peter Saville to redesign their logo, giving him a deadline of four weeks despite his protest that the deadline was “crazy” and a project as immense as a rebrand of one of the most iconic British brands in the world would require at least four months. The result was this:
Which looked pretty much like what I thought a four-week rebrand would look like. Not sure why they decided to do away with the classic tartan, but a recent Burberry visit indicated that the tartan and tan colours aren’t about to leave their fabric designs anytime soon. Which brings us to the point — why even bother to rebrand? Rebrands should be a considered process. Saville should’ve been given the four months he asked for. Not that all rebrands take that long — it’s entirely possible to create a brand in four weeks — but given the complexity of this particular project, time was necessary. Anything else would’ve looked a bit half-assed. And a half-assed design is one that’s unlikely to last.
People are always angry on the internet
That being said, even if you do come up with a good rebrand, more often than not people are going to hate it anyway. Google’s rebrand, for example, was necessary:
Their old branding was dated, and the new clean sans serif font worked well at small resolutions on screens. It looked sharp and clean and fun. People hated it. Michael Bierut wrote a recent article titled “Design as a Spectator Sport”:
The basic starting point of Graphic Design Criticism as a Spectator Sport is “I could have done better.” And of course you could! But simply having the idea is not enough. Crafting a beautiful solution is not enough. Doing a dramatic presentation is not enough. Convincing all your peers is not enough. Even if you’ve done all that, you still have to go through the hard work of selling it to the client. And like any business situation of any complexity whatsoever, that process may be smothered in politics, handicapped with exigencies, and beset with factors that have nothing to do with design excellence. You know, real life. Creating a beautiful design turns out to be just the first step in a long and perilous process with no guarantee of success. Or, as Christopher Simmons put it more succinctly, “Design is a process, not a product.”
Zara’s new logo isn’t the best solution to its new needs, but it’s a product that suits it well-enough — or at least, well-enough for the client to have bought it from Baron & Baron. We’re curious to see how it was sold through, even as we try not to get a headache from the painfully narrow shunt of space between the Z and the A.
At Starship, our design solutions are worked on in collaboration with the client and with other necessary stakeholders. The end-result isn’t often close to our original concept, but if it works for the client and for the purpose it was made, that’s what we want. We’re here to help, not to take over. Want to learn more? Get in touch.
This 34 minute short documentary about the ongoing refugee crisis, Lifeboat, by director Skye Fitzgerald is an Oscar nominee. Via Short of the Week:
There’s something to be said for the limited depth of our empathy when reading about a crisis compared to seeing it. Documentary has thus become a powerful tool for awareness and social change, giving a face and a voice to the otherwise undifferentiated mass of suffering people across the world. Skye Fitzgerald’s 34-minute Oscar nominated short documentary Lifeboat brings home an ongoing tragedy in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya in a truly visceral way that leaves a cold feeling in its wake. Released by The New Yorker, this chilling doc presents the ongoing refugee crisis surrounding North African migrants attempting to make it across the sea without fluffing it up with emotional bouts of unnecessary drama (as if it needed any). Fitzgerald’s entirely dressed-down approach is refreshingly raw, and allows the story to stand alone, capturing the desperation of thousands of nameless people whose individual experience is otherwise lumped into a banal and neutered term like “migrant crisis”.
A warning for those with weak stomachs, Lifeboat’s opening scene is a shock to the system and you should be aware that the dead are not edited out simply because it might make you feel uncomfortable. The sound of howling wind almost entirely eclipses the first cue of music as volunteers in dust masks retrieve bodies from what appears to be a deflated boat on a beach in the dead of night. An activist in his own right, Fitzgerald goes for the jugular from the start and its with this vibrato that he truly impresses.
The Wandering Earth is China’s first large-scale science fiction epic, and it’s incredible. Catch it in theatres before it’s gone. Via the New York Times:
“The Wandering Earth,” directed by Frant Gwo, arrived with stratospheric anticipation. Described as China’s first space blockbuster, it is already a hit in its home country and, on a more limited scale, in the United States, where it opened earlier this month. It certainly proves that the Chinese film industry can hold its own at the multiplex: It is just as awash in murky computer imagery, stupefying exposition and manipulative sentimentality as the average Hollywood tentpole.
Although the film is based on a story by Liu Cixin, it draws on a barely digested stew of planetary-cataclysm movies, with the eco-catastrophe and invasion films of Roland Emmerich serving as the most obvious spiritual guides. (Even a Chinese New Year setting correlates to the July 4 timing of Emmerich’s “Independence Day.”) In this case, the disaster — the first one, anyway — is that the sun is going to engulf the planet, so the multilingual United Earth Government has concocted a plan to send Earth out of the solar system using 10,000 propulsive engines, with Jupiter’s gravity providing the final oomph. But a slightly incorrect trajectory could cause a collision and end civilization, a crisis that is well underway. (Humans live in underground cities, having survived by lottery, and Earth’s surface is frozen.)
knows about the Beatles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD6FDkUXSZQ
Danny Boyle’s Beatles film Yesterday has a trailer out, and the premise is hilarious. What if a songwriter woke up in a world without the Beatles? Via IndieWire:
What would happen if you woke up one day and suddenly you were the only person with any recollection of The Beatles? That’s the scenario dreamed up by screenwriter Richard Curtis and director Danny Boyle for the upcoming musical comedy “Yesterday.” Universal Pictures has debuted the official trailer for the movie and it suggests the company could have a major counter-programming hit on its hands this summer.
“Yesterday” stars newcomer Himesh Patel as a struggling singer-songwriter named Jack who wakes up from a freak bus accident to discover The Beatles have never existed. Jack is the only person on the planet who remembers The Beatles and his music career skyrockets when he begins playing the songs made famous by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Star, and George Harrison. The supporting cast includes Kate McKinnon as Jack’s music agent and Lily James as Jack’s childhood best friend, plus Ana de Armas and Lamorne Morris. While British moviegoers may know Patel from his role on the BBC soap opera “EastEnders,” the actor’s role in “Yesterday” will surely be a breakthrough for him in Hollywood. “Yesterday” is Boyle’s first directorial release since “T2 Trainspotting.” The Oscar winner for “Slumdog Millionaire” was going to direct the next James Bond movie but left the project over creative differences. Curtis, meanwhile, hasn’t written a feature film since the 2014 movie “Trash,” although he worked on the story for last summer’s “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again,” which starred James.
Ridley Scott directed an ad for Hennessy XO… and… yeah it has to be seen to be believed. It’s very beautiful, but very weird. Via PR Newswire:
Complementing the idea that “Each drop of Hennessy X.O. is an Odyssey,” the Oscar® nominated director of The Martian and Gladiator, as well as cult films Alien and Blade Runner, creates a visual journey that explores the blend’s seven flavor profiles in a surreal, sensorial and immersive narrative. The film is a creative interpretation of each of the seven tasting notes, described by Hennessy’s Comité de Dégustation as illustrations of Hennessy X.O’s taste and feel: Sweet Notes, Rising Heat, Spicy Edge, Flowing Flame, Chocolate Lull, Wood Crunches; culminating in Infinite Echo.
“I was attracted to this project because I was inspired by the potential for art and entertainment to bring this story to life,” said Ridley Scott. “Hennessy has a great product, and I was lucky enough to have the freedom to interpret this and create something amazing. I think people will be stunned when they see the film.”
All seven notes evocatively take shape under the iconic filmmaker’s direction, with his subversive sense of narrative, unique light, and knack for radical and technical innovation. The seven notes, envisioned as individual worlds, are brought to life through wonderous and extreme physiography. The director leaves it to the viewer’s imagination if the film occurs in the future or past, in reality or a dreamscape, as he takes us through vivid scenes offering snapshots of each world.
7 Days Out is a new Netflix series showing the lead up to some of the world’s biggest programs — including the Westminster Dog Show. Via Madison:
Netflix’s upcoming docuseries 7 Days Out takes a unique look at today’s significant historical and cultural events in the worlds of fashion, food, entertainment, and sports.
The six-part series, premiering Friday, December 21, consists of 45-minute episodes wherein the seven days leading up to an event are chronicled. Acclaimed documentary director Andrew Rossi (known for First Monday in May) helms the ambitious project which is also brought to viewers by The Chef’s Table and Last Chance U executive producers Andrew Fried and Dane Lillegard. Joe Zee also serves as an executive producer on the project. For those curious about what will be covered, events featured in the show include the Westminster Dog Show, fine dining restaurant Eleven Madison Park’s revamp, NASA’s Cassini Mission, the Kentucky Derby, the CHANEL Haute Couture Fashion Show, and esports championship League of Legends.
In the premiere episode, go behind the scenes of the beloved Westminster Dog Show, where you’ll be swept up in the frenzy of the furry friends, their optimistic handlers, and busy groomers. Below we have an exclusive sneak peek at the premiere featuring some testimonial footage and backstage access to the animal-based event.
While we’re at it, the 2019 show has by now concluded, and here are some of our fav videos:
Gabby the Papillon. What.
4 time champion for the obedience trial, Heart the Black Labrador.