Hasta La Ideas

First up, Lady Gaga channels Leigh Bowery and Matthew Barney (amongst other things…) in this barmy promo for Bad Romance, directed by Francis Lawrence.

Next, director Yu Sato (part of SSSR) lets an alt Blue Man Group loose on a load of fairy cakes. Lovely stuff.

Twenty teams competed over the weekend to make a 60-second cinema ad for the ICA in just one day. Lucky Team 13 were the winners

The 24 Hour Ad Challenge was organised by M&C Saatchi and HypTV, based on the 24 hour film challenge concept by ‘guerrilla’ filmmaker Johnnie Oddball.

At 10am on Saturday, twenty teams of young creatives and filmmakers, gathered at M&C. There, the brief was revealed – they were asked to make an ad promoting the ICA, based on the idea of ‘now’. All the films had to be delivered to the ICA at 10am the next day where they would be screened for the judges and all the entrants. Here’s the winner…

Director: Martin Stirling
Producer: Michelle Craig
Creatives: Sam Norton, Ricky Diaghe
Production Coordinator – David Bridle
Editor – Alex Burt
Editor – Bejan Emamalizadeh
Camera – James Karinejad

Martin and Michelle explain how they came up with the idea: “We arrived with The Staring Man idea about 12 hours in. We were really dissatisfied
with the ideas we had started out with; high concept ideas felt like they came across as too gimmicky and the others relied on narration which risked being too explanatory, we felt that this didn’t quite fit with what we understood of the ICA.

“Our approach was informed by the type of work presented at the ICA in which patience always seems to be rewarded. We wanted to keep action to a minimum, to try and achieve confidence in stillness.

“We had a number of actors on stand by but decided on James Sobol Kelly because he has such expressive features. Ironically, the only direction we gave him was to hold his breath and watch for 60 seconds.

“We were pretty influenced by the work of Edward Hopper, whose work seemed to capture moments in time through simplicity.”

The judges – and I was one, alongside Alan Yentob, Peter Saville, Sophie Fiennes and Graham Fink – immediately felt that this was the stand-out entry. As Saville said, it understood that a gallery is about looking and seeing and felt appropriate for the ICA where it will now run as a trailer to the cinema programme.

For me personally, too many of the entries were couched in the cliched ad language so familiar to us from commercials. Many could have been ads for mobile phone companies or banks – urging us to live for the now and be all we can be. Team 13’s was brave and bold and simple. Interestingly, they do not come from a typical ad background, Stirling and Craig having met at the National Youth Theatre. They are about to start a production company called Shoot! with Barney Girling.

Congratulations to Team 13 and all the entrants – just getting something shot, edited and delivered in such a tight timeframe was a feat in itself.

To see more of the entries go here

A new installation challenges our preconceptions concerning heroism, not least because of its location on the walls of The Guards Chapel, spiritual home of the Household Division of the British Army

With British servicemen losing their lives daily in Afghanistan and yesterday’s Remembrance Day celebrations, the word ‘hero’ has been prominent in press and public debate of late. But what does it mean to be a hero today?

Complete Hero, a projection-based artwork by Martin Firrell, explores the subject through text and moving image. A series of films are projected on two sides of the Chapel, with sound accessible through headphones provided at the site.

Firrell has been Public Artist in Residence with the Household Division throughout 2009. To make the piece he conducted interviews with men and women of the Household Division, and wider Army, with direct experience of active service including Lance Corporal Johnson Beharry VC.

But the idea of heroism is also discussed in its wider sense, with actor Nathan Fillion speaking of male heroes in popular culture, writers Howard Jacobson and Adam Nicolson speaking of the hero in literature, philosopher A C Grayling, evolutionary geneticist Dr Adam Rutherford, and writer and speaker April Ashley, one of the first people to undergo a sex change operation.

“I wanted to make a piece of work that looked at all kinds of heroism, not just the usual derring-do of white square jawed men,” says Firrell. “But I thought it would be interesting to start with a white, square-jawed man and Nathan Fillion (of Joss Whedon’s Firefly and Serenity fame) agreed to come and take part – he flew in from Hollywood and kicked it all off and gave it some life on the internet at www.completehero.com. I called the work Complete Hero because I thought if you looked at different kinds of people in different contexts in different walks of life, you could do a 360 degree circle around the concept and from that the ‘completeness’ of the title would derive.”

Of working with the Army, Firrell notes that they are “the only commissioners who have not censored me at all – Tate Britain, the National Gallery, St Paul’s, Royal Opera all asked me to remove something, but the Army took it all – and they did it with the full understanding and knowledge of what it meant to take it all.”

Firrell also invited members of the public to contribute their own views and ideas via the project blog at completehero.com to help inform the final form of the projected work.

Complete Hero is at The Guards Chapel, Birdcage Walk, Wellington Barracks, London SW1, from 5pm to 9pm, tonight and tomorrow night (November 10) only