innocent summer planning
This is a great example of the kind of thing a blog can distribute for you. A simple, fun, interesting idea, related to the values of the brand, that gives a little bit of extra value to your real fans - the people who've made a little bit of effort to opt into a relationship with you.
I shall be attempting as many of these as I can this summer and will report back on progress.
Actually, maybe we could try it communally, and set up a flickr group to show how we're doing.
brian's chair travels
More interweb joy. I was looking via Technorati at who links to here and discovered that this Japanese blog is pointing at this post about the Brian Clough chair. I don't know what it says but I'm happy that the appeal of Brian is so universal.
similar things falling
(Russell and Neil appreciating contemporary art)
Went to see the wavelength 06 bit of the onedotzero festival at the ICA last night. With Russell and Neil. It was really enjoyable - being forced to sit and watch cutting-edge music videos makes you think about them, wheras normally you'd just flick over to Antiques Roadshow. As Neil points out, some are clearly going to be influential on the wider world of movies etc.
But it was equally clear that leading video-makers are as subject to the vissicitudes of fashion as the rest of us. There were some very clear themes:
1. Story-telling. Story-telling was not strong. The stories were either:
a. Bad things happen to someone sad. Slowly.
b. We wonder through all sorts of strange worlds.
c. Kids are spooky.
2. Technique. There were quite a few videos where someone in the process had clearly said - 'look, we can make it look like this, that's kind of cool, I've never seen that before. Is that enough for a whole video?'
3. Similar things falling. You get the impression that one of the things that the current generation of digital animation tools can do very well is get a lot of nearly (but not quite) identical things to all fall down the screen in a nice way. Sometimes, as in The Doves Sky Starts Falling this is very effective. Often you get the sense they can't think what else to do.
4. Can you make it any sadder? You also get the impression that someone's invented a depressing button. And that Tomato are the Led Zepplin of digital video, their influence was palpable. Every bit of type was fractured and everyone was striving not to be clean and shiney and to seem hand-crafted and antique. Almost film had been designed to appear like a piece of Czech animation from the 50s, badly stored and inadequately restored.
5. If all else fails animate the lyrics. There was a lot of this. But I don't mind this. I like it.
Overall, well worth going, there's some really interesting stuff happening that you'll miss if you're not glued to MTV2. Of course, I was depressed by how young everyone was, jaded digital video veterans of 22.
