A clever piece of publicity (and book design) for the Rethink Scholarship.
The Rethink Scholarship is an $18,000 scholarship for aspiring art directors and designers to Langara College’s Communication and Ideation Design program. The winner will also receive a 3-month internship with Rethink.
Reminds me of:
ABC3D on Youtube, on Amazon.
One of the great music videos by N.A.S.A. mentioned in that Tom Waits post (though I don’t know if it’s the best) features the distinctive work of the artist Marcel Dzama (ignore the D and you’re probably pronouncing it right). The song, ‘The People Tree’, features David Byrne so, you know – get to it.
But Dzama’s imaginatively eerie style (if his art was in a horror film, it would be an artful crayon drawing by a haunted child that makes the parents wonder just what the hell is wrong with their kid) has been better captured on video elsewhere – in this Department of Eagles video for ‘No One Does It Like You’, which the artist himself co-directed with Patrick Daughters:
(Dzama also, Wikipedia tells me, contributed to this Bob Dylan music video ‘When the Deal Goes Down’, but his contribution seems to come only at the end, by which time it may be competing for the viewer with the creeping approach of yawns and sleep.)
If you like Dzama’s style, McSweeney’s publish a collection of his work called The Berliner Ensemble Thanks You All, which is as beautiful and composed of as many small wonders of unorthodox formatting as you might hope from a McSweeney’s book.
Okay, so NASA bombed the moon recently, and I think we can all agree that’s kind of cool, in the same way that slapping Lenin’s corpse in the face would be kind of cool: it’s intuitively a good idea, but once you’d done it, it would be hard to be too proud or say exactly what you’d really accomplished.
But N.A.S.A. the music project (standing for North America South America, and fronted by Squeak E. Clean and DJ Zegon) have been turning out some of the best music videos ever made, so it’s hard to say which is now my favourite NASA. Oh wait, did the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ever do a song with Tom Waits? No? Then fuck them.
And it turns out Tom’s been animated before – he was rotoscoped for a 1978 short called Tom Waits for No One, singing ‘The One that Got Away’ (the film even won an Oscar for Scientific and Technical Achievement).
And there’s some of the original footage on YouTube, before the animators drew over it:
And! here’s a video directed by Anders Lövgren that animates the lyrics to the Waits’ song ‘Come On Up to the House’ in hand-drawn type. Stick with it – it’s a simple idea, but so well done it becomes hypnotic instead of tedious. (It doesn’t hurt that it’s a great song.)
(Thanks to my friend Stephen for letting me know about Tom Waits for No One; ‘Come On Up to the House’ video via The Font Feed. It should be noted that despite his being a figure of beer-slurring cigarette-smoking louche male disintegration, I feel for Tom Waits roughly what six-year-old girls feel for pink.)
Graham Linehan on Twitter linked to this Life magazine image of children in Paris watching a puppet show. It’s 1963 and a dragon’s just been slain:
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’):
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.
To create any kind of art, whether personal or commercial, without taking inspiration from the art of others that preceded it is neither a realistic nor a desirable goal. Still it seems like it might be worthwhile, or at least interesting, to track some more or less original ideas as they work their way into advertising – advertising being constantly hungry for new and attention-grabbing ideas.
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.