It made me think of the photographer Robbie Cooper’s Immersion project. He filmed children playing video games. The level of involvement’s similar, but the concentration is something else. I don’t know exactly what that says about video games.

You can see more images on Robbie Cooper’s own website (just click ‘Simulations’ and then ‘Immersion’), and you really should go and watch this video of the players at the New York Times, from which the stills are taken.

More recently he applied the same technique to adults watching pornography, and the result is almost upsetting it’s so personal. I don’t know where you work, but I think they’d probably appreciated if you were at home before watching this 18 minute video of interviews and watching porn-watching.

UPDATE

Serendipity! Suddenly this becomes another instalment of Advertising Will Eat Us All.

About an hour after I posted this I was flicking through the ol’ feed reader and came across this post on the Creative Review Blog about a new Japanese advertising campaign for the slim PS3 called Playface. As with Immersion, they’re filming people as they game.

Take a look at the website, or the advert:

I don’t know if it’s the context or the people they’ve chosen, but it seems stagier.

And someone in the comments to the Creative Review post also points out this photo series by Phillip Toledano (who feels as if the Playface campaign ‘happily ripped me off’):

]]> http://greaterthanorequalto.net/blog/2009/08/immersion/feed/ 2 http://greaterthanorequalto.net/blog/2009/06/aweua2-pabloferro/ http://greaterthanorequalto.net/blog/2009/06/aweua2-pabloferro/#comments Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:00:36 +0000 Alan Trotter http://greaterthanorequalto.net/blog/?p=43 Just to reiterate, this is an occasional attempt to trace the work of creative minds as it is adopted, reused and transformed by those that follow them, and (either sooner or later) ingested by the hungry maw of advertising. Only because the attempt might be kind of fun, not because referencing or being influenced by previous creative work is necessarily a bad thing.

Here’s the trailer for the American release of Armando Ianucci’s implausibly funny and just as clever political satire In the Loop.

Trailer for In the Loop on Funny or Die

The frenetic cutting of the trailer calls back to the work of Pablo Ferro, who was recruited by Stanley Kubrick to make the trailers to Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and A Clockwork Orange. The In the Loop trailer also refers to the Clockwork Orange trailer in its choice of soundtrack: both use a disturbingly insistent electronic version of the William Tell Overture (in the grip of madness, or when woken by them first thing in the morning, all mobile phones sound like this).

Trailer for A Clockwork Orange on Google Video

Trailer for Dr. Strangelove on YouTube

As well as working with Kubrick on these two trailers and on the opening credits for Dr Strangelove, Ferro’s work includes the titles and the iconic split screen editing in The Thomas Crowne Affair.

However, Kubrick apparently initially approached another master of quick cuts to produce the trailer for Dr Strangelove – Arthur Lipsett, whose short film ‘Very Nice, Very Nice’ Kubrick much admired. Lipsett declined the offer, and Kubrick got Ferro. (You can see ‘Very Nice, Very Nice’ here, if the National Film Board of Canada’s website is working.)

Whether Ferro was influenced by Lipsett when cutting his trailers together isn’t clear. But this is the tradition the makers of the In the Loop trailer built on to convey a sense of the film without including any of its impressive, inventive and near-fucking-constant profanities. Which is a pretty miraculous feat of editing.

This isn’t to pass judgement or cast scorn. In art (including advertising) being under an influence is nothing to be ashamed of. Appropriation can be done intelligently and elegantly (as much as it can be done crassly). And good derivative work will stand up to having its influences identified and examined.

Anyway, this time, the excellent work of graffiti artist Blu, whose animation MUTO appeared on the internet about a year ago and has since had more than 7 million views through Vimeo and YouTube. If you haven’t seen it before, you’re in for a treat.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by Blu on Vimeo.

On 15 May last year, in response to all the attention MUTO earned him, Blu wrote on his blog:

if you are asking for advertising works the answer is: NO THANKS
if you are asking for music videos the answer is: see above

Unable to recruit the original artist, advertisers have done their best without.

BBC Radio 6 Music ‘Get an earful’ promo by the BBC on Vimeo.

Lee’s story from Action for Children on YouTube.

(It’s worth mentioning that this is one of a series of, I think, very successful adverts by Action for Children.)

And here’s a music video using a similar technique (leaving the remnants of previous frames of animation visible) but using chalkboards.

Autumn Story chalk animation by Firekites on Vimeo.

]]> http://greaterthanorequalto.net/blog/2009/05/aweua1-blu/feed/ 1