The ‘Dulux Walls’ film (part of their latest advertising campaign) has to be one of the most beautiful commercials of the last few years.

The idea is a really simple one- get locals from run-down and neglected areas in cities across the world and record them painting their neighborhoods. It’s not a typical TV commercial or web spot. Rather it’s an example of branded content whereby companies bankroll something that could stand alone as a piece of film or art as a way to promote their brand in the long term. The Let’s Colour campaign is the work of Euro RSCG and is backed by a media budget of about 15 million dollars.

It’s a comprehensive campaign too, with a lot to chew on beyond the Walls film clip by Swedish director Adam Berg. There’s an extensive behind the scenes flickr gallery with some great portraits of the participants (and their feet). There’s also interactive blog/twitter feeds and video interviews from the sidelines of the shoots. Not to mention the shoots themselves- which act as large scale public events promoting the Dulux brand. Click here for a ‘making of’ video for the film.

The best film making leaves you wondering whether you saw an elaborate set piece or something computer-generated and the last scene from the film of the Jodhpur skyline certainly looks unreal. But it was done the old fashioned way and part of the reason to do something like this for real is to capture genuine reactions from the people involved. Which is why all the supplementary media for this project is so important. The standout is this short documentary on the people involved in painting the Lapa Stairs in Rio De Janeiro.

It’s hard to tell from the outside whether a campaign like this would see an immediate return on such a large investment but the value lies in building something with widespread appeal (across language and cultural barriers) that can gradually focus attention on the brand.

It’s a brave move from Dulux but I’d love to see more companies advertise their products by using them in some sort of urban renewal project like Let’s Colour.

If you’ve got a spare 20 minutes watch David McCandless‘ talk about data visualisation at the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference.

Considering how much time I’ve spent watching lectures on TED it seems a shame that I haven’t done a post on the site. Day to day I draw ‘inspiration’ from a lot of things I watch and read and listen to but it’s rare to actually be inspired. Yet almost every single speaker at TED has something truly encouraging to say about the state of the world and the breakthroughs that are being made in their respective fields. Mainstream news media seems to exist just to keep score of the various interpersonal, economic or environmental disasters that occur. So much so that it’s easy to forget that any progress is being made at all. That the people who are giving these lectures are not afforded the same status in our society as the best athletes or musicians or performers is disappointing but the site provides these scientists and thinkers with a limitless audience and it has been encouraging to watch interest in the site and the event itself grow from year to year.

I guess this talk is as good as any to represent TED because it deals with the way in which large ideas and can be summed up without losing their truth in the compression process. It also highlights the power of statistics and demonstrates how the integrity of the person designing the infographic is really what determines its value. So what’s needed in the media at the moment is not just more context and more infographics but also more honesty on the part of those publishing them.

More photos from Aimee Fairman’s work at at Craft Cubed here in Melbourne.

Click here for a hi-res version of the labyrinth in the drawer.

Wonderful rolling time-lapse video of Japan by American Director Brad Kemer using the Canon 5D MarkII.

It’s hard enough to a find a few short seconds when the conditions are just right to take a good landscape image. Which makes what Brad has done in this clip that much more impressive because some of these scenes look like they could span up to an hour.

As hi-def video equipment becomes more accessible and is piggy-backed onto SLR cameras hopefully this sort of work will become more commonplace.

Caught a wicked set from Dan Kelly at the Corner Hotel here in Melbourne on Friday night for the release of his new album ‘Dan Kelly’s Dream‘.

It was great to see Dan and Beyonce rocking out with a full band and bringing to life to some old classics and new tracks from the album. Love how he prefaces each song with a little story that just barely manages to make sense. You can get a feel for Dan Kelly’s brand of weirdness on his blog but it’s something else in person.

Far and away the catchiest tune on the new album is Bindi Irwin Apocalypse Jam which starts with;

The forces of cool may shout me down
but here is some gold from ye olde brain town
I was busting some laps across the pond
bending my thoughts to a world gone wrong
thinking I will retire to be under the sea
just ringo and terri
bindi and me
and jimi’s there too
laying it down
big bubbles of sound
so we all don’t drown!

singing oo wee oo wee
bindi and me bindi and me
oo wee oo wee
apocalypse jam under the sea

I find writing about music to be very tricky so I’ll just say that it’s a terrific album and quote Amelia’s review on Throw Shapes;

I like that Dan Kelly makes pop music and yet there’s something a bit too weird in it for most normal people. In the second verse when the beat drops in, I’m convinced that this is total gold pop genius material. Possibly “Wooowee, Bindi and Me” is a bit confusing for most kids as a chorus line, but let’s face it, we all wish we were on an underwater odyssey with Bindi as our friend and guide. I hope she stars in the video clip, that crazy little lizard-faced gelfling thing that she is.

Listen to the track here.

The ‘Jazz-Packing‘ campaign was conceived by award-winning creatives Jason Deacon and Emma Park and it involves series of videos touting the various things that one can pack into a Honda Jazz. They let their babies out into the big grubby world of the internet only two weeks ago and the response has been pretty staggering. The ‘How Much Hipster?’ short already has 247,000 views as of this post; thanks largely to a groundswell of public antipathy towards the most fashionable subculture around at the moment.

The ads were seized on immediately by the website Look-At-This-Fucking-Hipster.com (www.latfh.com) and since then the video has been making the rounds on facebook and youtube as more and more people set aside a minute and a half to make fun of the pretentious. The campaign also involves a facebook-integrated competition asking people to submit ideas as to what to attempt to Pack into the Jazz.

K-Swiss recently hired Keith Schofield to put together a fairly awesome commercial with the tag line ‘Have an Awesome Day. Which is timely, because 2010 has turned out to be the year of the word Awesome. Personally I’m hoping the word ’splendid’ makes a revival in 2011.

Have a look at it here because the version that’s on youtube is ever-so-slightly different and yet not quite as good.

It’s possible I only dig the video because it’s backed by a chirpy cover of a Ramones track but it also includes many of the trademark Keith Schofield touches; a really playful sense of humor, snappy editing, wonderful cinematography and some surrealist touches.

It’s also great to go through his films and glimpse some scenes recreating the more bizarre photos that crop up on the internet every now and then.

In the K-Swiss ad the reference is to a photo taken by Damien Meyer during this year’s Tour De France of a spectator grandstanding with his antler-hat during one of the climbs.

Schofield brings a welcome bit of weirdness to his commercial work but it’s in the various music videos that he really shines. In many cases the idea alone would be worth the price of entry but the execution is always a joy to watch; almost to the extent that you lose track of the music while your brain keeps pace with the visuals.

Probably the most recognisable music video would be the Toe Jam clip for the BPA featuring Dizzee Rascal. But he was also responsible for the Bad Blood music video for Supergrass which has some very clever camera work and editing.

The music video for Heaven Can Wait by Charlotte Gainsburg and Beck references (among other things) this amazing image taken by Italian photojournalist Emilio Morenatti of the judicial crises in Pakistan in 2008. . .

. . .and one slightly less amazing picture by photographer John Maniaci of a party-goer getting taken down by a policeman in Wisconsin.

I love being able to see where he draws his inspiration from some of the time and just having to guess the rest of the time.

http://keithschofield.com/

I was lucky enough to be invited along to the opening of a couple of exhibitions at Craft Victoria including the work of Melbourne installation artist Aimee Fairman.

Together with another local artist Alexander Ouchtomsky, Aimee has created a number of pieces inspired by childhood under the title ‘I’ll Show You My Craft If You Show Me Yours. True to form the pieces are intricate, carefully crafted and slightly unsettling - inspired by those spooky fantasy films of the 80s like the Dark Crystal and The NeverEnding Story.

According to the statement on Craft Victoria’s website ;

the works aim to explore shifts in territory between reality and imagination, experience and memory, and representation and perception.

The image above is what greets you when you peer under the covers of the bed in Aimee’s surreal childhood bedroom. Click here for a hi-res version. Very Jules Verne.

And here’s the artist in question.

Another exhibition entitled Playing Field takes up the main gallery space and includes some of the works below.

The exhibition runs untill the 21st of august. Visit Craft Victoria for more info;

http://craftvic.org.au

After months of deliberation the Royal Commission report into the 2009 bushfires has been released and its findings have been made public.

The ‘Black Saturday’ bushfires burnt more than a million acres of Victoria, destroyed more than two thousand homes, injured 414 people and killed 173. The reports’ recommendations mostly relate to procedural issues between the Department of Sustainability and Environment and the Country Fire Authority - the two bodies responsible for land management and firefighting. But perhaps more important than improving the emergency response or the training of CFA staff and volunteers is the renewed emphasis on community education that will come about because of the tragedy.

The CFA had, in the years leading up to the 09 fire season alloacted roughly half its annual budget (116 million dollars) on prevention and awareness programs but even with their best efforts it would take something catastrophic to really remind people of the dangers of living in the bush. I went to the CFA meeting in Marysville before the 2006 fire season and listened to Alex Cocky from the CFA brief local residents on fire safety and the importance of having a survival plan and sticking to it. Looking back It’s hard to imagine someone like Cocky going to those meetings each year without being intensely aware of the the uniquely dangerous position Marysville’s residents were in- with isolated homes hard up against the forest, few access roads or fire breaks and no possibility of defense.

But he was also aware of the statistics and he told people that if they evacuated they ought to do it early because most people are killed trying to escape at the last minute. I remember him telling his audience that more than half the civilians that died during Ash Wednesday in 1983 left homes that survived the fire.

My family’s holiday house in Buxton outside of Marysville burnt down alongside every other house on our road on Black Saturday. There are photos of the aftermarth under People and Places in my photography folio- they are just details of the stuff we had built and brought to the house over the years.

The photos below are landscapes of my cousin’s property in Kinglake and they were taken six days after Black Saturday. When I got there the larger trees were still smoldering and there was a brown/orange tinge to everything from the smoke leftover in the atmosphere. What struck me at the time was the ease with which you could cover ground when all the vegetation was gone. Their property backs onto the Kinglake National park and the creeks and gullies that feed into Mason’s Falls had previously been a sort of temperate rain forest with dense shrubs and tree ferns making it a challenge to get through. Walking through the the park after the fires was liking walking across a parking lot.

some more dramatic images of the fires can be found on the Boston Big Picture website.

For the non-Australians the format is based on this government TV commercial from a few years ago promoting the National Security Hotline. Setting aside the intent of the ad campaign the actual TV spot was very well designed. They took a fairly abstract idea (phone calls ‘adding up’ to an image of Australia) and kept it visually interesting without resorting to hammy re-enactments or far-fetched scenarios.

The individual graphics for my my clip were created using Photoshop and and then brought in to After Effects for animation and blending. The hardest part about putting it together was just coming to grips with the interface and the sheer range of options and variables available within the program.

It’s taken me about seven or eight years to really get my head around all the techniques and effects offered by photoshop. In the past I’ve worked on files with dozens of different objects, text elements, masks and adjustment layers and it can get fairly confusing (especially when I decide not label any of my layers). But After Effects is another beast entirely. The ASIOKE file had about thirty or so different objects each with their own timeline synced to the audio track but within each timeline are literally dozens of sub-timelines allowing you to set keyframes for everything from opacity and colour to things like the number of virtual iris blades for the out-of-focus lens effect.

It’s really pretty overwhelming.

But also exciting knowing how much possibility the software offers.

As part of the clip I put together a spoof logo reminiscent of the commonwealth coat of arms but with spooky microphone men taking center stage.