The Solitary Life of Cranes
I watched this superb documentary about the life of crane operators in London who spend their lives sat high up in the sky, who talk about their daily observations of people below. It's beautifully shot and feels so calm. You can catch it on 4oD at the moment.
Do you eat crap?
I really love the little details in this ad for The Pump, in NYC... Look out for subliminal bacon.
The Real Good Chair Experiment
I read about Blue Dot's abandoned chair stunt ages ago, and now they have made a film about the experiment. To quote Shareable...
Blue Dot Studio put 25 of their chairs on the streets of Manhanttan, and then followed the chairs through a combination of GPS and video surveillance as people picked them up and took them home--which, by the way, the public could follow in real time on Twitter. Then the filmmakers interviewed the chair-collectors.
I thikn it's a really neat, playful promotion for Blue Dot, and the resulting video is beautifully put together...
The Gregory Brothers, auto-tuning madness…
I have just spent the last 30 minutes watching The Gregory Brothers' brilliant and hugely funny videos, where otherwise banal news items, famous YouTube clips, and political debates are turned into farce with a little help from some liberal Kanye West-style auto-tuning. Go straight to their YouTube Channel to view all the other videos...
Kate Tempest, slam poetry
I'm struggling to find anything at all about Kate Tempest - an amazing British female slam poet I just discovered, who was featured on a Teen's Speech video for Barnados...
There are a few more videos of her over at Dead Dean's blog, filmed during the BBC show 'Why Poetry Matters' with Griff Rhys Jones, and on a post at the Teen's Speech site itself.
Onedotzero screening at Wieden+Kennedy, London
Last night I went to see a Onedotzero screening at Wieden+Kennedy whose theme was 'Craftwork': an acknowledgement of the movement towards craft in moving image, followed up by Hi5's astonishing short, Logorama. Read on for some of the highlights...
“The Social Media Guru”
I know it's a bit hypocritical to post something about the amazing advances in social media and then this in the same breath, but I found this very funny video created using Xtranormal that sums up a typical social media expert.
My bug-bear with the new crop of "experts" is that they are peddling expertise in a medium which because of its social nature is inherantly not difficult to use and requires no expertise. A brand's use of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. all demand just a modicum of common sense, yet it seems so many brands get it hopelessly, embarrassingly wrong, presumably after paying chaps like this a ton of cash to help.
The social media for any brand is easy: sign up for the (free) tools, and have a meaningful, two-way conversation with your consumers; but only after you have your core operations and marketing processes have been tightened and locked-down.
For instance, everyone's least favourite brand, BT, are on Twitter ready to handle the torrents of rant and hatred on Twitter yet can't even handle their own basic customer service procedures: a case where use of social media is damaging the brand even more.
Giedre Domzaite, new showreel…
YCN represents the incredibly talented illustrator (and animator), Giedre Domzaite. Johanna showed me her new showreel yesterday and was amazed...
Scrumdiddlyumptious
Just found these great tracks and videos from a guy who works at Google's out of office responder (!). They are created by a guy called Pogo, who can be found on YouTube and MySpace.
Building the Mission Bicycles retail experience, Adaptive Path
One of my new favourite blogs, Boutique Cycles, posted this video by Adaptive Path which takes us through the process they went through in building Mission Bicycle's San Francisco retail presence. They essentially replicate the online experience which results in a very 'easy to use' retail experience which is a nice concept, but somehow the results look a little cold and impersonal.
If Aphex Twin was a little girl…
I haven't posted anything in a very long time but I think this video of a little girl's nonsense turned into some superb Aphex Twin-style nonsense is a perfect way to bookend the hiatus.
Shitdisco, “OK” - popup-book video
As part of a bit of research for a project that's going on, Lisa showed me this really nicely executed video.
Firekites video, by Lucinda Schreiber and Yanni Kronenberg
From Lucinda Schreiber, "We shot roughly 1900 frames... the frame rate varies between 12fps, 8fps and 6fps throughout."