Yugo Nakamura: The craftsman

In a world filled with bloated, work-a-day and downright irritating websites Yugo Nakamura creates compelling beacons of playful ingenuity and simplicity

Mike Figgis Wants Us All To Be Nice On The Bus

Your top five hates on the bus? Kids playing music out of their tinny mobiles? Litter? People shouting down their phones? It’s OK. London’s buses are about to become oases of calm and civil behaviour thanks to director Mike Figgis.

Chris Palmer discusses his work

The many faces of Chris Palmer
Director Chris Palmer is profiled in this month’s issue of Creative Review, where he discusses his journey through the world of advertising, from his early days as a copywriter to becoming a director and running Gorgeous Productions, as well as his current interest in moving towards feature film direction.
This news may strike a blow to the advertising world, as Palmer has created some of the best-loved ads of recent years. These include Skoda’s Baking of…, which saw an entire car created out of cake, and Carlsburg’s Old Lions, where a group of veteran England players form the ‘Best Pub Team in the World’, both of which cleaned up at the recent BTACA Awards. As an extension to the magazine piece, we’ve brought together some of Palmer’s greatest recent ads here, alongside his personal commentary on his work.

Obey Obama

Shepard Fairey is well known for his prolific stickering and flyposting of his propaganda-style images. While we at CR are well aware of his ability to stick his images just about anywhere in any city, we’re still surprised to see his the two hot-off-the-press posters he’s created in support of Senator Barack Obama…

Video remixing

Just, Mark Ronson featuring Alex Greenwald, directed by Jim Canty
Producer, remixer and horns-fancier Mark Ronson has released a new video for his jaunty cover of Radiohead’s Just (the first video, for the 2006 release of Ronson’s version of the track, can be seen here). But this time he hasn’t just stopped at remixing the song, but has also attempted a witty pastiche of Jamie Thraves’ iconic video for the original version, shown below. Skip past 45 seconds or so of Ronson demonstrating his musical prowess by playing lots of instruments and we re-join Thraves’ perplexing street scene of fallen businessman.

Schweppes Short Film Festival

Still from Consequence, directed by Noah Marshall. Click through to main story to see full film
CR has stumbled upon this rather fine selection of short films a little late but thought we’d put them up on the blog in case you’d missed them too. Created by New Zealand agency Publicis Mojo for Schweppes towards the end of last year, the films are part of a new campaign to reposition Schweppes as a soft drink for adults.
Perhaps with the success of the branded content BMW films in mind, the agency devised the concept of a Schweppes Short Film Festival, with five directors from The Sweet Shop asked to create films aimed at ‘a mature audience’. The resulting shorts are a mixture of the darkly comic and the provocative, and are shot in a variety of styles from noir to horror to retro. Unusually, Publicis Mojo and The Sweet Shop were given a free rein in terms of creative content by Schweppes, as long as each film contains a ‘Schhh Moment’. Consequently all the shorts make reference to Schweppes at some point, however this product placement is thankfully subtle and clever.

Wolff Olins: Expectations Confounded

2012…New York…Wolff Olins have never been far from controversy over the past 12 months. ADRIAN SHAUGHNESSY was one of the 2012 logo’s most prominent critics, so we sent him along to find out just what has been going on at the design consultancy…

Indaba Time

Yes, it’s coming up to that time of the year again, when the great and good of the design world decamp to sunny Cape Town for one of the highlights of the conference year, Design Indaba. For 2008, the menu includes Ivan Chermayeff, Gert Dumbar and KarlssonWilker who will all be asked to tell the gathered masses how exactly “creativity can make a better world”…

Leslie Ali’s Sundance Diary

Partizan director Leslie Ali travelled to the Sundance Film Festival this week, after her darkly humorous short film The Object (shown above) was selected from thousands of submissions to be entered in the official competition. Ali’s trip to Sundance is the latest development in a career that has seen her move from working as an agency creative to directing full-time for commercial clients including Nivea, 3 Mobile, and Sony, alongside making short films.
Ali kept a diary about her experiences in Utah for CR, which included meeting with a talent scout from William Morris, watching The Object shown on the big screen at the Egyptian Theatre, and gossiping with an ex of Jack Black’s at a screening of Michel Gondry’s latest feature Be Kind Rewind. Read on for Ali’s full account of the events…

Case Study: FaulknerBrowns identity

Architects FaulknerBrowns have a new identity system courtesy of London-based design studio, A2/SW/HK. A2’s Scott Williams and Henrik Kubel worked on the project for two years and their holistic approach represents a major image change for the architecture firm founded in 1962, that concludes with the total redesign of the company’s Newcastle HQ.

YSL ditches the catwalk in favour of film

For its recent Paris fashion show YSL took the unusual step of commissioning a film (shown above) to replace the usual catwalk show for its autumn/winter menswear collection. The film, directed by Colonel Blimp’s Sarah Chatfield and Chris Sweeney, was the brainchild of YSL creative director Stefano Pilati and showed as part of last week’s Paris Fashion Show. Running at seven minutes long, it is a glossy affair, presented across three screens and starring Rome actor Simon Woods.

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