Count the ones you know!

WARNING: Includes violence, swearing, and sexually suggestive material.

Logorama was created by a collective team of French animators. In 2009, it won the Academy Award for best short animated film.

This entire animation is about branding and how much it overwhelms us. There were so many different brands that I either recognized or didn't, and what I liked about this film is the creative use of each brand, whether it is a building, or the dropping of liquid to make 'Nickelodeon.' Although we pass through our day with brands around us, we aren't usually aware. With this video, it shows people that are equally unaware, but to us, it is prevalent.

Something about the animation that took be surprise was how light coloured the film appeared for it's darker and dramatic scenes. This made the brands visual and recognizable. What really made the film stand out was as I mentioned, the use of the brands in their everyday life and the creativity used to put them in unexpected places, like the X-Box logo for the crack in the earth.

Establishing a Character

Just adding to my objection with Mamet saying that establishing a character isn't as important, I think this advertisement from Coca Cola proves the opposite.

What I like about this ad that made it successful (in my eyes at least) is the characterization. There are two others, but I wanted to use one that used the puns to make it humorous. Each character, the Eye, the Tongues and the Brain are given a character based on what they are -- the Eye can easily spot that the Coca Cola Zero is not actually the original and the Tongues taste it and can't read the label, indicating that it is the same. The Brain comes in with the humorous, "You're giving me a headache." which fits it's character very well. The characterization is important for the Brain because it gave threats to the Eye and the Tongues because it is in control, like our brains are typically in control of us.

I feel that something like this would help with scriptwriting as we reach to the stage of developing our narrative video in a short amount of time. For me, character and plot has always been important, even in film. What was so successful about this is that they were able to establish such in a short amount of time, less than the maximum our second assignment is supposed to be. This makes me wonder how I can make my video effect with a developed characters (or character). With this ad, they used a literal representation to get their message across along with things only those literal objects (Eye, Tongues, and Brain) can do.

Honda - The Cog

The past week, my group and I filmed our first MM2B03 assignment, the Video Tableau. We had to adapt a painting or photojournalism picture into a 30 second film. What was interesting about this assignment was that there were no effects or editing done to it and it was to be done in one shot. Although it was really challenging, I felt that we got a good result as we depended a lot on the quality of the camera, our planning and how we adjust it manually to create a result we were satisfied with.

It was tricky doing something in one shot as you have to focus more on the actors and how they can get through the thirty seconds and less on taking multiple shots with different zooms and angles. When I received this assignment, a famous ad by Honda popped into my head as it too was done in 2 shots (but made it seemed like one), but it was certainly not done in one take!

When we were shooting our tableau, I felt that our shoot went fairly smoothly. it was nothing compared to the Cog advertisement by Honda. The Honda ad took over 600 takes in order to get that 2-minute ad and they had to set up each time when something very small didn't work. Our shoot took a few days as we had to go through much planning, costume searching and having to go back to the beginning because we ran into issues. To get this 2-minute ad, it took 3 months in order to complete, going though night and day to get it just right as they did it all in 2 shots and seamlessly combined only because their studio was not big enough to do it all in one. Although there was CGI added to create the smooth transition, other than that, it was all done without it.

This ad is one of my favourites just because of how much time and thought was put into it. While our class suffers with doing a thirty second film in one shot, this was two minutes, and all though it wasn't done in one shot per say, it used as little CGI as possible to try to create it.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/advertisements/hondacog.asp