Oct 27 2011 October 27, 2011 October 27, 2011 5Comments by ben

Weekend

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Incredibly touching video will:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmLgONR8k9o&feature=player_embedded

Masterchef Innuendos (thanks, P):

Weird, creepy thing (thanks, A):

For those of you who have no idea what I look like, this is me playing basketball:

Look at my fucking red trousers (thanks, J).

Kanyed By The Bell (thanks, M).

Amazing Hallowe’en pumpkins.

Women looking unsatisfied in bed (thanks, J).

Biggest spec script sales of all time.

Warner Bros. trailer typography.

Congressman Dingell in 1999:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiEDbZzO5-8&feature=player_embedded

Alfred Hitchcock ‘s ghost stories for young people (thanks, P):


Oct 27 2011 October 27, 2011 October 28, 2011 1Comment by ben

What people went through in WW2.

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Here’s an interesting Twitter idea that gives people the chance to follow the lives of four Londoners in 1943 for three weeks up to Remembrance Day.

Each character tweets throughout the day, giving a sense of the kinds of experience that people went through on the Home Front.

From where I’m sitting (a nice warm desk in a safe office in not-in-the-least-at-war London) WW2 seems an abstract and remote notion, so I appreciate the chance to think about what millions of people went through so that I don’t have to worry about Leeds being turned into a giant concentration camp.

Oct 25 2011 October 25, 2011 October 25, 2011 5Comments by ben

Great Music videos have come a long way since ‘take on me’.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_sM62EIsFk&feature=player_embedded


Oct 25 2011 October 25, 2011 October 25, 2011 19Comments by ben

I RATHER LIKE THIS

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8B1ZNv9m4s&feature=player_embedded

Sweetly observed, well shot, touching – especially if you have a family.

Even the VO is pretty good (and it could have gone so wrong).


Oct 24 2011 October 24, 2011 October 24, 2011 23Comments by ben

Copywriting: the how-long-is-a-piece-of-string theory

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Copywriting is the part of the advertising process most subject to change. Here’s why:

1. Everyone has done some writing at some point in their lives. This means that everyone involved in the process feels somewhat qualified to pass judgement on a piece of writing. It doesn’t matter that the last thing they wrote was an essay about their summer holidays, they know what they like and they’ll want that reflected in the lines. And whether it’s the planner, CD, CEO, junior client, senior client, tea lady or client’s chauffeur’s mistress, many people thinks their opinion on writing is as valid as the professional writer’s.

2. Copywriting is cheap. If you need to reshoot or spend another fifty grand on a different music track, there are definite and obvious limitations, most of them financial. But copywriting costs as much as a pen, some paper and a living copywriter (the price of a Starbuck’s white chocolate and raspberry muffin and an americano), so you can go again and again and again at no extra cost. I know hours are logged on time sheets and all that, but that happens in every process; copywriting is the most cost-effective part of the advertising process, so lets have some more.

3. Copywriting looks quick. Admittedly, you may need some time to set a line or two, but compared to the creation of the brief, approval of the work, production of the work and post-production of the work, coming up with lines can appear to be a very speedy process. Although the lead up can take ages, the actually writing of a line only really takes about ten seconds, so if you need 100 lines you might only need twenty minutes – or so many people seem to think.

4. People don’t like making decisions. I’ve been called into situations where literally hundreds of lines have already gone off to the client with no success. This is almost certainly because it’s far easier to ask for more than it is to finally make a choice, then take responsibility for that choice. Far easier to say that you asked them to keep going but nothing quite worked, which is why you ended up with ‘EuroMegaBank: moving forward into the future’.

And you’re never allowed any help, like getting a comedy writer in for a funny script or a newspaper columnist for a short, witty argument. That keeps it all as quick and cheap as it can possibly be.

Hooray.


Oct 20 2011 October 20, 2011 October 21, 2011 4Comments by ben

Bumper weeeeeeeeeeekend

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Noses (thanks, J).

Lebowski Ipsum (thanks, P).

Another work of beautiful genius from Spike Jonze (thanks, P):

http://vimeo.com/30704658

Why do we dream (thanks, P)?

Stupid people own guns (and title YT clips) (thanks, J):

Brilliant Hallowe’en food (thanks, P).

Would you like to hear a cure for the US financial corruption crisis expressed with passion?

Some things that are more likely than you clicking on a banner ad (including getting struck by lightning).

Excellent animated history of the iPhone:

Beauty of the semiconductor (thanks, P):

The mouth sounds guy from Police Academy does Whole Lotta Love (thanks, K):

Shatner’s Bohemian Rhapsody (thanks, M):

Very cool old cartoon mashup (thanks, P):

They don’t fall off diving boards as entertainingly as they used to (thanks, D):

And the modern version (thanks, D):

And Doing Something can mean growing a moustache.


Oct 19 2011 October 19, 2011 October 19, 2011 33Comments by ben

What a suntan can tell us about insignificance

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When I was at school I was told that rich Elizabethans tried to make their faces look as pale as possible. In doing this, many of them died of lead poisoning as it was the principal ingredient in their whitening make-up.

The reason they did this was that a tan was seen as a sign of poverty. Peasants who had to work all day in the fields would have colour in their faces, so the theory went that the richer you were, the more you stayed indoors and the whiter your face would be.

Fast forward to the Twentieth Century and the reverse becomes the status quo: with the advent of air travel, it is seen as a sign of wealth to have a tan as it suggests that you can afford to go abroad and enjoy the sunshine that is less prevalent in the UK. And although it’s no longer that expensive to travel to sunny places, the tan’s place in society has largely remained the same: a symbol of some ability to travel and find the time to lie beside a swimming pool for a week. And the make-up situation has switched from white to brown as fake tans become more and more popular.

So there’s no intrinsic value to a suntan. We collectively decide whether it’s good or bad to have one and act accordingly. As a naturally pale person who doesn’t really tan much, I have tried and failed many times to get a tan. Why have I wanted one? Thinking about it, I have no clear idea. I suppose there’s some thought in the back of my mind that it looks better, but as the above proves, that is some temporary aesthetic value based on somewhat arbitrary criteria. In fact, as we all know, a tan is an indication of unhealthiness because it’s a sign that your skin has been mildly burned, so perhaps the pendulum is due a swing in the other direction (I can only hope).

But if there’s no intrinsic value to something that so many of us spend a great deal of time, money and effort to achieve, what else are we buying into based on an ultimately pointless pursuit of a collectively trumped up notion of superiority?

When you think about it, loads of things:

Almost all music, food choices based on flavour, colours, books, movies, paintings, weather, the position of cheekbones, wine, religion, conversation topics, Edwina Currie, most of politics, newspapers beyond their facts, football teams, scientific theories, wallpaper, age, race, sexual orientation, moustaches etc. etc. etc.

It’s all just one person’s white make-up over another person’s brown, and yet these opinions lead to very real consequences, sometimes including death.

Here’s a rule of thumb: if you can have two different opinions about it, it doesn’t matter. Obviously, what people can do with those opinions can matter a hell of a lot, but at its heart any dispute of that kind is simply a load of fuss about nothing.


Oct 18 2011 October 18, 2011 October 18, 2011 14Comments by ben

Ummm…

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Full marks for originality and full marks for being completely batshit insane.


Oct 17 2011 October 17, 2011 October 17, 2011 16Comments by ben

1994 – year of the poster

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In 1994 I was doing a summer job in Brentford. It consisted of typing the numbers that some phone salesmen had sold to some people or something into a computer (interestingly enough we held all this information on pieces of ‘paper’ that were stored away (or filed) in metal cabinets. One day the computer bloke came in and claimed that we would soon be able to store these items in an ‘electronic’ form, ‘scanning’ them in like so many pictures. I still don’t know if he managed it, but he was a sharp kinda fellow, so I think there’s every chance his kooky wee plan came to fruition).

Anyway, it was as boring as you might imagine, and if it were not for the fact that my computer also had solitaire and the guy next to me, Michael (who became literally my first proper friend of Afro Carribbean descent – heady days), was incredibly funny I think I might have committed all kinds of suicide. Have I mentioned that I was saving up for a club 18-30 holiday to Ibiza? Good Lord, what was I thinking?

But the one thing I remember as a shining beacon of enjoyment from those dingy days was the fact that my bus route took me past some of the best posters in the history of advertising.

(For some reason my bastard blog host is refusing to let me put pictures up, so you’ll just have to look them up in the 1995 D&AD).

There was Nike’s ’66 was a great year for English football, Reg and Al larking about, Hello Boys, the Hello Girls Billy Connolly tribute next to it, The Economist, Polo and even good ones for movies such as The Mask.

Howsaboutthat?

Now you know what I’m about to say: why aren’t there posters of that quality these days? None of the above was particularly expensive, or particularly hard to put together (of course it was hard to get the art direction and copywriting right, but these were not major production jobs), so money and time should be no excuse, but Sunday Times Rich List aside, I really struggle to think of great recent British posters.

Any ideas why that might be?

(By the way, I know they’re called Out Of Home now – or even more ridiculously, OOH. I remember the first time I saw that on a brief and genuinely thought some sarky planner was taking the piss. ‘Review the OOH work on Wednesday’ – say it like John Inman and you’ll see what I mean. Anyway, OOH makes zero sense as a name for this stuff. What about cinema ads? They’re Out Of Home (unless you live in a cinema), and what about radio ads that you listen to at work? Oh forget it.)


Oct 15 2011 October 15, 2011 October 15, 2011 26Comments by ben

I love inception

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I’m watching Inception again.

I love the clothes, I love the acting, I love the fact that it only has two funny moments, I love the fact that it’s as thought provoking as it is entertaining, I love the music, the post and the headfuck.

But most of all I love the way it can plausibly be several stories at once:

There’s the ostensible story, which is entertaining enough. But then there are five others, of which this is my favourite:

All of Inception is a dream.

We are never once shown reality. Every frame of Inception is a dream. Whose dream? My money is on Cobb, though it is conceivable that Cobb is simply the subject and that he is in someone else’s dream (see Interpretation 3 and 4 below).

There are a number of key elements throughout the film – lines of dialog shared amongst the characters (Mal and Saito both tell Cobb to take a “leap of faith”, Cobb predicts what Saito will say in limbo), acceptance of improbable events during segments of “reality” (Saito saving Cobb in Mombasa) – that support the notion that everything is a dream, but for me it all comes down to a simple question: What is our totem? We learn very early on that the one unimpeachable way to know whether or not you’re in a dream world or the real world is to test your totem; an item whose behavior only a single individual can identify and predict. In the case of Cobb, it’s his wife’s spinning top. Arthur’s is a single loaded dice. Ariadne’s is a precisely weighted chess piece. But what is the audience’s totem?

What event in Inception is the audience aware of that no one else can know? There isn’t one. There’s no point in which reality is clearly and unimpeachably established. The film opens in a dream sequence (Saito’s limbo) before transitioning to another dream sequence (Saito’s dinner party), which then slides into another dream (Saito’s secret apartment). The characters supposedly awaken from that last dream sequence aboard a Japanese train, this presumably being our first glance at reality, but one must ask how the characters arrived from the apartment to the train. There’s no visual transition; no shot of “tunneling” from one reality to another. One second we’re one place, a second later we’re somewhere else, but can you remember how we got there? No, because we’re never shown it; we’re never shown the awakening process that bridges the two. And not being able to identify specifically how you got from point A to point B is clearly established within the film as a sign that you are in a dream.

That transition, if it existed, would be the audience’s totem; it would be the one thing we can cling to, whose behavior we can understand intimately and always predict. By not giving the audience a totem of their own, Nolan has flat out made it impossible to ever anchor any portion of the film as being real versus being a dream.

Now, that’s not to say that the movie is ruined if everything is a dream. It doesn’t negate the emotional breakthrough that Cobb goes through, which is ultimately what the film is about. In fact, everything being a dream is the ace up Inception’s sleeve: if it’s all a fantasy, then there can be no plot holes; the lack of deep characterizations for anyone other than Cobb can be chalked up to the fact that they are all his projections and thus do not require rich histories or distinguishable character arcs. It’s basically a catch-all safety net for any complaints registered against Inception’s narrative.