suppendapo (2009, 33 MB, 2:51 min)
Are You Alive?
Wanna Stay That Way?
By Wreck & Salvage.
Category Archives: commerce
March Madness at the DC Training Facility
Commerce meets art. Maybe.
Actually if you wear the shoes you can really do all that.
No..er..really.
From DC shoe.
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
Wal-Mart (2005, 9.4 MB, 2:48 min)
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price was the documentary film sensation
that’s changing the largest company on earth. The film features the
deeply personal stories and everyday lives of families and communities
struggling to survive in a Wal-Mart world.
It’s an emotional journey that will challenge the way you think, feel.. and shop.
Directed by Robert Greenwald.
Flooded McDonald’s
Superflex – Flooded McDonald’s (2009, 8.2MB, 0:41)
Clip from a twenty minute video of a McDonald’s
being fully submerged underwater. (Don’t worry –
they recycled the water, and no staff was present.)
What do you think it means? Is it a statement about
collective inability to act, climate change and multinational
corporations, or consumption?
Whatever the intentions, the video is oddly calming.
From Danish video collective Superflex.
Uffe Ellemann-Jensen in Tokyo
Uffe Ellemann-Jensen in Tokyo – (2008, 5.1MB, 1:18)
Bear with me here: have you ever felt lost? I don’t
mean existentially. I mean alone in a place that was
not your own, a foreigner in a strange land, a stranger
in a foreign land. I have on several occasions – including
during a solo trip to Japan a few years ago – and when
this commercial came on my TV about a month back, I
couldn’t tear myself away. No, it isn’t net art or experimental
animation, but it’s beautiful and haunting and something I
certainly see far too little of on television. If you think a little
Lost in Translation, you wouldn’t be wrong for that. The guys
behind the this piece admitted in a recent interview that they
paid special attention to reproducing LiT details for fans of the film.
Other facts: this is a commercial for SAS featuring former
Danish Secretary of State, and two more similar follow-ups
are running/forthcoming (though not featuring Ellemann-Jensen or Japan,
sadly). The startlingly mournful music is appropriately from Babel.
The tagline reads, in English, “Almost home” or “As good as home.”
PES – Sneaux Shoes – Human Skateboard
Sneaux Shoes launched a consumer-generated video campaign
with a stop-motion video of a human skateboard. The TV ad
features a skateboarder using a kid as a skateboard and performing
classic tricks like ollies, grinds and 360s.
PES who directed the video made it entirely in-camera (Canon D20)
and on location through the use of a stop-motion animation technique
known as pixilation. Says PES: “This spot is a great example of the
breadth of stop-motion. If something exists in the real world, it can be animated.”
Editing and sound design was done by Sam Welch at Homestead, New York.
Skye Bender-deMoll
Skye Bender-deMoll – Organic Brand Ownership Networks (2007, 9MB, 0:18)
We love moving charts and maps, in case you couldn’t tell.
This one, from Skye Bender-deMoll, features organic food brands
circa late 2007, and their often overlooked connections.
The yellow nodes are food processors, blue are investment firms,
green are organic brands, and red are new organic brand introductions.
via Another Limited Rebellion
Get Out and Pay
Get Out and Play (2008, 36.9MB, 1:25 min)
Somebody called Donna sends us a mail ‘writing from a Nokia sponsored blog’.
Donna, kind soul that she is, thought
‘With your stop motion background we thought you might have a
different take on the video than the gamers and
tech bloggers who might normally watch the video’
Aw..bless her!
Nothing to do, then, with trying to use as us a part of an attempted
“virality” strategy ( don’t get us wrong, we’re impressed dvblog even
appears on these folks’ radar)
So..watch the movie..it’s good.
There’s stuff to be learned here, no doubt –
not least that the corporate vultures can clearly buy in time and talent;
but how much better a world it would be if the silly amounts of cash it
clearly cost to make this just went straight to fund new work by artists…
WalMart Growth
Toby Segaran – WalMart Growth (2008, 6.6MB, 0:46)
Toby Segaran isn’t a media artist – he’s actually
a software developer and writer. But, he made
this excellent video clip of American WalMart growth
from 1962 to the present on his off time at work,
and the way I see it, the best work sometimes
happens when you, well, aren’t working. Similar
to these videos made with the processing language.
Papa and Daddy
Papa and Daddy – Jump Start (2008, 9.8MB, 0:53)
Papa and Daddy (Shawn Preston and Ross Ludwig)
made this terrific 2008 Superbowl commercial,
a fun coincidence since I found their charming ad
work via Food Chain Films, a nice page of several
directors based in Portland.