More LA for you today! Continuing the trend of fashion houses creating artistic short films featuring collaborations with famous directors to go along with their print campaigns, Oliver Peoples has created a real show-stopper.
For their new campaign, they brought in former fashion editor-turned-director and photographer Lisa Eisner to shoot Devendra Banhart and his (stunning) real-life girlfriend Rebecca Schwartz at the famous John Lautner Rainbow House on Mulholland Drive in LA.
NSFW, in an artsy kind of way, I’m pretty sure this video couldn’t be any sexier. The colors, the light, the song, the setting… allow yourself to be lulled into a daydreamy haze.
PS- How awesome is this song? It is called Brindo and is by Devendra.
A wonderful little piece of wonderment for your day…
Above, an ad for the new Canon Pixma printer, below, the making of the ad. To create what you see above, they put drops of paint on a membrane over a speaker, and then when they played a sound through the speaker, it made the paint bounce up, and they caught the action at 5,000 frames per second. That’s a lot of frames per second.
The result is ultra-clear slow motion video of tiny bits of gelatinous color exploding into the air.
The ad itself is wonderfully captivating, and the making-of film, if it’s publicized, will be an interesting combination of the two trends I’ve been talking about on this blog related to advertising… the short film approach (Chanel, GANT) and the “real people” approach (Tod’s by Eliot Erwitt and Cole Haan by the Selby), where the photographer him/herself is known and hyped (not just a tiny credit somewhere), and the subjects are real people who use the product (not actors) and are identified. In this case, it’s not exactly the first or the second, but still carries the themes of a well-crafted story and a behind-the-scenes, “we’re not a nameless, faceless corporation” tone. Interesting here that they even reveal who the advertising agency behind the project was…
What happens when you give Scorsese only 1 minute to tell a story?
It comes out just like a Scorsese– a man trying to find himself, flashing camera bulbs and shutter sounds, an opening sequence pulled from another point in the story’s timeline, Rolling Stones, etc. The only thing missing is violence, but you wouldn’t necessarily want that in a cologne ad. Pretty fantastic little film.
Speaking of short films, have you noticed the trend of fashion houses hiring big name directors to shoot “short films” rather than “commercials” these days? I like it! I’d much rather watch a little short than a traditional ad!
The GANT film wasn’t a big name director, but it did definitely have this short film feel. If you missed it, catch it here.
PS – I’m mad for the painted patterned floors at 0:30. Aren’t they amazing??
Iconic seventies tennis brand Boast is being relaunched with the help of Partners & Spade, who art directed these awesome photos by Susanna Howe.
Partners & Spade also helped produce this animated video about the history of Boast and its founder, Bill St. John, the tennis pro at the Field Club of Greenwich.
I’m pretty taken by Partners & Spade (and, well, all the Spades for that matter)… they crush it every time. See past post on Partners & Spade here.
In my ongoing love-hate relationship with Best Made Co., I present to you a preview of their soon-to-be-released short films, which, based on the clip, seem to prove that their designy axes actually are functional, not just pretty. And of course, the video itself is pretty. Shot at 2000 frames per second, it’s actually pretty stunning.
I still maintain that anyone who is seriously into axes and hard (yard) labor probably doesn’t care if their axe is painted with cool stripes, but, nonetheless, I’m a sucker for everything these guys put out there! From the axes to the maps to the videos! Why! The degree to which this stumps (bahhh axe pun) me is sort of absurd.
I have no problem with functional objects being well-designed; in fact, on the contrary, I’d say I’m borderline obsessive about my functional objects being pretty. My problem is that I don’t think the business model makes sense– I just can’t believe that if you made a Venn diagram of axe-wielders and pretty-functional-object-lovers that the circles would overlap very much.
Hence, I’m dying to know the profile of their customer. If they largely live in Manhattan and Brooklyn, then that proves my point but only furthers my annoyance, as I can just imagine people hanging these things on their wall to look cool and never touching them again.
The MAK Center’s project “How Many Billboards, Art in Stead” asked 21 contemporary artists to each produce a billboard to be placed around Los Angeles, giving residents a break from the generally un-stimulating clutter crowding their cityscapes.
Wouldn’t it be cool if, for some amount of time per year, billboard owners were required to give a portion of their billboards over to art instituations for projects like this, the same way tv networks have to allow ad space for PSAs? And every once in a while you would glance at a billboard and see art instead of an ad?
Read more about the project (which is sadly over) in this NYT article.
This video about the hand-painted billboards on the sides of buildings in New York, and the people who paint them, has a really magical quality. It sort of feels like when something starts with an image of the world from outer space and then zooms in and zooms in and zooms in and you finally land on one tiny detail on ground level… here the detail is the little world that revolves around the tiny and dying industry of hand-painted billboards.
It’s one of those things you might stop to think about for a brief moment every once in a while– “Who painted that? How long did it take?”– but then you never really get answers so your mind never wanders very far. In this really well-done (love the cinematography and the editing) short sponsored by Stella (brilliant move), you get a close-up peak at this world that not only gives those answers, but also puts human faces to the signs that seem to magically appear around town.
If nothing else, watch the the thirty seconds at the end between about 12:00 and 12:30… you miss out on the story but the visual is still awesome.
Loving this random act of creativity.
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