From this month, the Typographic Circle will be running a series of evening events for its student members aimed at inspiring and informing the next generation of creatives and designers
The student programme was set up by BETC London head of design Louise Stolper. The events are aimed at helping students “prepare for the creative industry and highlight the amazing roles and exciting opportunities that are out there”. According to Stolper, “These will be smaller, more intimate sessions [than the regular Typo Circle talks] with leading industry figures, to give you a chance to ask questions, interact and learn from the best.”
Speakers over the coming months will include Mark Denton, The Partners and Alison Carmichael but the programme will begin with a session with Charity Charity, the ex-Executive Worldwide Creative Director at JWT, Global Creative Director at EuroRSCG and Saatchi & Saatchi who will talk about creative inspiration.
Tickets are £8 and are for Typographic Circle student members only, available here. Details on membership here.
AG Rojas won the Best New Director award at last year’s UK Music Video Awards. As the shortlists for this year’s awards are released, we talk to Rojas about his year, which has included launching a film programme, and experiencing some crazy-sounding times in the world of advertising…
Rojas is based in LA, and by the time he picked up the new director award last year, he already had an impressive body of work under his belt, including music videos for Spiritualized and Jack White, a number of short films, and also ads, including the one below for O2. His work has a distinctive cinematic style, with a poetic edge.
CR: How did you first get into directing? AGR: First, I wanted to be a musician so I learned a few instruments. Then I wanted to be an illustrator so I started copying Quentin Blake. Finally when I was 14, I settled on directing. I got into Art Center College of Design [in Pasadena] when I was 17 off the back of a few weird films I had made with my brother. I dropped out soon after.
When I was 20, I started working at Streetgang Films, which was an amazing, boutique music video production company with a tight roster. That’s where I met, befriended, and learned from some really influential people. Specifically Vincent Haycock, Andreas Nilsson, and Paul Minor.
CR: How were your first experiences of making videos – what did you learn? AGR: It took me a few years to realise what kind of music videos I wanted to make. I got lost for a little while making performance videos for friends and friends-of-friends in my late teens, but soon came back to narrative videos.
CR: What piece of work are you most proud of? AGR: I don’t really like to dwell too much on past work, but I would say my first video for Spiritualized [below] is the most complete and satisfying narrative I’ve directed. At the moment, the work I’m doing with Mainline, a company I founded with Vincent, is what I’m most proud of.
CR: How would describe your filmmaking style? AGR: Not precious.
CR: Do you enjoy working on ads? Is it very different to doing music videos? AGR: It’s without a doubt one of the most rewarding, fun, adventurous and stress-inducing careers that exists. One minute you’re trespassing a warehouse in Berlin, the next minute you’re the victim of an attempted pick-pocketing in Cape Town, and the next you’re in a seven hour pre-PPM meeting in a hot room in Beirut. That sounds like a good commercial actually.
CR: What’s your favourite music video of all time? AGR: Easy answer. Rabbit in Your Headlights. [For Unkle, by Jonathan Glazer, shown below.]
CR: What are you working on at the moment? AGR: I’ve just finished production on a World Cup campaign for Powerade with Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam. It was a five week shoot around the world, and we were able to create six documentaries which I’m very excited about.
CR: What’s the best thing about being a filmmaker now? And the worst? AGR: The best thing is that (somewhat rare) moment on set when you realise you’re creating something truly special and you’re surrounded by friends. Per diem is also cool. The worst thing is when you are impeded by politics and other people’s fear.
CR: What piece of advice would you give to someone trying to get into filmmaking now? AGR: Find an artist you think is amazing and has a chance of becoming popular and do a really smart music video for them.
CR: Tell me about your film programme, Tribute, why did you set that up? How’s it going? AGR: Tribute was born out of short documentaries I used to make years ago. I’ve never really been obsessed with being a prolific filmmaker, but the lulls between jobs can get really boring. As a reaction to those lulls, I would go out with a friend, find a teenager, and film them for a day.
My good friend Matt Lambert runs the video portion of a collective called Bare Bones, of which I was involved. Matt inspired and influenced me to reach out to the large network of young directors I’ve built up over the past five years, and Tribute was born. The ultimate goal is to create an indefinite visual archive of global youth. I can imagine a retrospective ten years from now of a hundred films. I think it’s a unique thing to create a portrait of a young person which is unattached to a brand.
AG Rojas is represented by Caviar. The winners of this year’s UK MVA Awards will be announced at an event at the Southbank Centre in London on October 28. To view all the shortists, including this year’s Best New Director nominees, visit ukmva.com.
D’ici 2016, la marque Apple va s’offrir un énorme campus à Cupertino en Californie. Projet déjà défendu par Steve Jobs en 2011, cet ensemble pourra accueillir 12 000 salariés, sera autonome en énergies et disposera en prime d’un amphithéâtre. Une maquette du chantier fini est à découvrir dans la suite.
This week’s round up of great new ads features work from Jack & Jones, Paul Smith, Volvo, the BBC, Adidas, and the Drink Aware charity. We open with a series of films starring Christopher Walken, which trade on him doing what he does best: being cool…
The five films (two shown above) were created by Danish agency &Co, and directed by Bacon’s Martin Werner. They see Walken in a variety of quirky settings ‘creating’ the clothes.
Next up is the most unexpected piece of underwear advertising that the CR team has seen for a while. Shot by director Sébastian Montaz-Rosset for Paul Smith, the film sees two slackliners (crazy rock climbers to you and me) hanging out in the French Alps in their pants. Despite how this sounds, the resulting film is elegant and pretty gripping.
The latest in Volvo Truck’s series of stunt ads is out, and this time sees an 18-tonne truck driving around the narrow streets where the Ciudad Rodrigo bull run takes place. Accompanying the film, shown above, is an effective 360 site that takes you right into the heart of the action, and is well worth a look. Find it at thechase360.com. Agency: Forsman & Bodenfors; Creatives: Martin Ringqvist, Björn Engström, Anders Eklind, Sophia Lindholm; Production company: Smuggler; Director: Henry Alex-Rubin.
The BBC created this rather lovely animation to promote Grayson Perry’s series of Reith Lectures, which began on Radio 4 today. Creative director: Andy Booth; Creative head: Dan Moore; Creatives: Ben Twiston Davies, Grayson Perry; Animation: MIE; Director: Yibi Hu.
Two sets of posters next, first up two striking pieces from Adidas that form part of a wider campaign created by Sid Lee Amsterdam and photographer Sophie Ebrard. Creative director: Simon Schmitt; Retoucher: Barry Craig, Digital Giant; Special Effects: Erick Brennan, West FX.
Finally, we end on a serious note, with one of a series of posters created for the charity Drink Aware, which promotes responsible drinking. The campaign is from TBWA and created by Paul Belford and Sean Doyle.
Voici ce nouveau projet du duo français Zim And Zou qui a réalisé la vitrine de la boutique d’Hermès à Beverly Hills. Intitulée « Atlantis », ces superbes créations tout en collages nous plongent dans de superbes cités aquatiques. A découvrir en détails et en images dans la suite de l’article.
Ads are rarely laugh-out-loud funny, so these spots for US nut brand Diamond Nuts are well worth checking out…
The ads are created by Deutsch LA and directed by Mike Maguire. The premise is that Diamond Nuts creates baked goods so delicious that the person eating them will become the daughter, boyfriend or husband of your dreams. And it turns out that the bakers have some pretty strange, and very funny, fantasies lurking inside them. Here are three of the ads, you can watch the rest, and get some delicious recipes too, on the brand’s YouTube channel here.
Credits Agency: Deutsch LA Group creative director: Gavin Lester, Jason Elm Creative director: David DeRoma, Cliff Leicht Creatives: Jennifer Lai, Kevin Martin, Matt Meszaros Production company: Biscuit Filmworks Director: Mike Maguire
Lars von Trier knows how to attact the attention of the media. And he’s done it in style this week, with the release, via the internet, of a set of posters for his forthcoming movie Nymphomaniac, which picture a number of A list stars lost in the heat of the moment. The 14 posters are CR’s Ad of the Week.
Now, before you all run to the comments box, we know the ‘orgasm face’ ad has been done before. Frank Budgen shot a series of ads for Coco de Mer featuring ordinary folks on the brink of climax back in 2001, and Trojan also worked the style in 2004. And, as we noted in a blog post from 2009, gaming companies such as Sony have also run ads featuring close-up shots of people’s ‘game faces’, which are remarkably similar (make of that what you will). And before any of those, came (sorry) the book Headshots by Aura Rosenberg. However, there is something about seeing the expressions of famous stars in the throes that make these posters leap out. I’ve put all 14 posters below, but they include actors Jamie Bell (above – what would Billy say?), Uma Thurman, Willem Dafoe, Shia LaBeouf and Charlotte Gainsbourg, among others.
The simple text and full bleed character photos are also reminiscent of the classic poster campaign for Trainspotting too. But despite these similiarities, this online launch of the images has got everyone talking about the film, which isn’t even due to be released worldwide until next year. In a week where we’ve seen film companies use elaborate pranks for the promotion of new movies, it’s nice to see that a good old poster campaign can still do its job. Now, enough chatting, here are those pics…
Orientée sur la pratique et l’état d’esprit du longboard, ce film pour la marque français Oxelo a été réalisé par l’agence Ores, déjà en charge des précédentes campagnes de publicité. Des images simples et réussies de ride, présentant 3 des modèles de la marque. L’ensemble est à découvrir dans la suite.
Vine, the app that allows users to create six-second-long videos, has begun to be used in television advertising. In this guest blog for CR, Katie Norwood of London Creative checks out the work made using Vine so far, and ponders its future as an advertising tool
Dunkin’ Donuts became the first company to air an advert consisting of just one Vine, when they partnered with Monday Night Football on ESPN in a quick ‘billboard’ spot last month. The brand ran a Vine spot before the game started, and then ran another video later on that referenced action that had just taken place - this was the main excitement of the use of Vine here, the fact that it allowed the brand to respond in super-quick time to live action, giving TV ads some of the immediacy of social media. The videos were then heavily promoted via Twitter using sponsored Tweets.
Since then, other brands such as Trident Gum have also decided to use the micro-videos in their TV spots but these campaigns featured a series of the short clips, created by the most popular video-makers on the service. An example is shown below.
Nissan picked up on this crowdsourcing potential too, by inviting Vine fans, through competitions on Twitter, to make Vines (and Instagram shots) on the theme of ‘love’ that could be featured in its next TV ad. Airbnb also turned to Vine users for its first TV ad, but this time went one step further and sent out script instructions for the filmmakers to follow, before knitting the films together into a four minute-long ad. These campaigns bring an element of interactivity to TV advertising that goes one step further than the ‘second screen’ trend of checking social networks whilst watching television shows.
So is the future of TV advertising Vine-shaped? It seems pretty unlikely.
Despite the creativity and engagement – particularly in its link with social media – that Vine can offer advertisers, it comes with a lot of restrictions. For starters, while Vine may offer advertisers one second more than the five second-long TV ads that Trevor Beattie recently predicted were the future, this gives advertisers a very limited timescale to showcase their product compared to a traditional advert of 30 seconds. It gives creatives less time to hook in a viewer who may well be distracted, and there is more risk than ever that they might miss the entire ad.
On top of this, TV advertising is still a huge investment to make, taking up significant chunks of a marketing budget, and primetime ad space will still set back companies a great deal of their budget even if they use Vine to make the campaign itself. It seems unlikely that anyone but well-established brands would use it regularly.
The engaging aspect of Vine on TV is its newness and the surprise factor it offers: it’s a fresh and innovative format that draws in young people particularly. And the format is especially interesting for the way it has signalled a way to make an even closer link between TV advertising and social media, particularly in the case of the Dunkin’ Donut spots.
However, like all ad gimmicks, if more advertisers decide to use micro-videos in their ads, this eye-catching factor will soon become humdrum. With new apps, technology and social media trends emerging constantly I think we’ll have to enjoy Vine TV ads while they last, before the next new hip thing comes along.
Uniqlo has launched a new website that gives you 16 different hairdos to go with outfits from the brand’s new collection…
The site, called Uniqlo Hairdo, is created by Projector, the Japanese studio (who also now has an office in New York) behind Uniqlock and a number of other projects for the brand. Beautifully designed, it uses a mix of photography (by Carl Kleiner) and animated gifs to take you through each stage of creating the ‘dos.
Here’s how you create ‘The Kristy Bow’ for example:
This look doesn’t seem to make the model that happy, but if you feel that way too, there are plenty of other choices on the site.
The website is linked to Uniqlo’s recently opened Pinterest site. It is one of a number of ‘Life Tools’ websites and apps created for the brand by Projector. Another is Uniqlo Recipe, an app made in collaboration with six chefs who have created recipes in response to Uniqlo’s clothes. But the real charm lies in the Hairdo site, which can be found online at uniqlo.com/us/lifetools/hairdo.
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