Tag: creativity

Commercial directors making today’s coolest adverts

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The whole commercial makes no mention of brand or models excepting the tiny-print identifiers appearing for a second or two. If you’re in the market for something like this – you already know what you’re looking at!

This is from the Portland, Oregon, crew at Wieden+Kennedy

Wayne McClammy, Hungry Man

McClammy credits meeting Emilio Estevez with kick-starting his career (“If Emilio can direct, I can direct,” he thought), and soon he was making viral comedy hits, many for Jimmy Kimmel. (His short “I’m Fucking Matt Damon,” with Sarah Silverman, notably won an Emmy.) His star-studded reel showcases this broader gift for comedy. Case in point: a growing list of credits for Geico and The Martin Agency that includes the instant goofy-camel classic “Hump Day.”

“Hump Day” alone makes him a star in my skies.

Click here for nine more insane in the membrane-directors leading the world of commercial advertising.

Toddlers who lie do better in life

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Toddlers who tell lies early on are more likely to do well later, researchers claim.

The complex brain processes involved in formulating a lie are an indicator of a child’s early intelligence, they add.

A Canadian study of 1,200 children aged two to 17 suggests those who are able to lie have reached an important developmental stage.

Only a fifth of two-year-olds tested in the study were able to lie.

But at age four, 90% were capable of lying, the study found. The rate increases with age to a peak at age 12…

“It is a sign that they have reached a new developmental milestone.”

Boy, I wish someone had told my father about this.

Guardian editor rejects Murdoch’s paywall

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The Guardian editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, has delivered a riposte to Rupert Murdoch’s campaign to introduce paywalls to newspaper websites, claiming that it could lead the industry to a “sleepwalk into oblivion”…

Last year Murdoch revealed that he would introduce charges for access to all his news websites, including the Times, Sunday Times and the News of the World by this summer. Last week the New York Times confirmed that it too would introduce a paywall to its website by 2011.

Rusbridger pointed out that News Corp has frequently used the price of news to attack rivals. “Murdoch, who has in his time flirted with free models and who has ruthlessly cut the price of his papers to below cost in order to win audiences or drive out competition (‘reach before revenue’, as it wasn’t called back when he slashed the price of the Times to as low as 10p), this same Rupert Murdoch is being very vocal in asserting that the reader must pay a proper sum for content – whether in print or digitally,” he said.

“Fleet Street is the birthplace of the tradition of a free press that spread around the world. There is an irreversible trend in society today which rather wonderfully continues what we as an industry started – here, in newspapers, in the UK.

“It’s not a ‘digital trend’. It’s a trend about how people are expressing themselves, about how societies will choose to organise themselves, about a new democracy of ideas and information, about changing notions of authority, about the releasing of individual creativity, about resisting the people who want to close down free speech.

“If we turn our back on all this and at the same time conclude that there is nothing to learn from it then, never mind business models, we could be sleepwalking into oblivion…

The Guardian editor told an audience of academics and journalists in London that it is more important than ever to focus on journalism: “If you think about journalism, not business models, you can become rather excited about the future. If you only think about business models you can scare yourself into total paralysis.”

RTFA. Please. If you care to learn about where a major stream of journalism is going on the Web.

Murdoch will relegate his empire to decline and dusty signs along disused secondary roads. Just like a great deal of Route 66 alongside Interstate 40.

iPhone – therefore iArt!

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Like many of us, Mike Nourse is both irritated and entranced by iPhones — their ubiquity, their utility, their unique power to extinguish conversation. Unlike most of us, Mr. Nourse, a co-founder of the Chicago Art Department, is in a position to do something useful with his internal conflict. And so he has, introducing a five-week class called “iPhone Art” at his nonprofit arts education organization.

“I wanted everyone to shut up already about what their iPhone could do and show me what it actually does,” said Mr. Nourse, 37, a video artist and photographer who moved to Chicago in 1996.

Despite Mr. Nourse’s mixed feelings about Apple’s latest gold mine, he said the course was an obvious vehicle for the art department, an all-volunteer organization that describes itself as “dedicated to cultivating new voices, ideas and practices in contemporary art.”

“We’ve always been rooted in accessible art,” Mr. Nourse said. “The idea that people could create art with something in their pocket — that seemed like something we needed to tackle.”

The iPhone class has eight students. Each of them are responsible for producing a project, in any medium they choose, for a public exhibition titled “iPhone Therefore iArt…”

The course costs $50, but in keeping with the spirit of the Chicago Art Department’s pedagogical mission, anyone who completes the course and shows their work next month will have their tuition refunded.

Not anymore outré than showing someone with a computer how to blog, design, be creative with a medium they hadn’t heretofore considered.

Worthwhile.