Fusing rap and tax returns is not for mainstream media, but it works very well online, Intuit demonstrated on April 15, when “It’s Just a Breeze G,” the $25,000 Grand Prize winning video in The TurboTax Tax Rap contest, played on YouTube.
“It’s pretty interesting for a financial company to feel comfortable doing this,” said Seth Greenberg, Intuit’s group manager of online advertising and Internet media. “The goal was to engage a broad array of tax payers.”
The idea wasn’t to create an ad from the winning video that can be played on TV, but a video that played on YouTube, which has an audience that rivals TV.
“We executed a home page takeover on YouTube on April 15 that drew over 10 million views and 250,000 downloaded the video,” Greenberg said.
YouTube also hosted the contest, which ran from February 8 to March 30 and drew 370 submissions. YouTube visitors selected the top 13 videos and Vanilla Ice, the popular rapper, chose the winner.
It’s a video by Zeke O’Donnell and Christian Pulfer, associate editors with Fluid, the New York-based music and editorial company that has done work for HP, Bank of America and Red Stripe Beer. O’Donnell shot the video, and Fluid composer Judson Crane wrote the rap music. Pulfer starred in the video as the rapper who uses TurboTax to get a big refund: “Cuz if you need a dollar, holler, cuz I got a lot back,” he sings, gleefully.
The crew used a Sony VX1000 camera to shoot the video throughout New York City, “from Soho to Redhook to Park Slope to the roof of fluid on Broadway,” Pulfer said. The video uses a combination of indoor and outdoor shots to follow the main character as he relates his experience and demonstrates how to use TurboTax. A number of “compositing tricks” were used, according to Pulfer, including reverse footage that shows money flying into Pulfer’s hands and the insertion of the TurboTax logo with After Effects.
The winning video played on Youtube on April 15, but the excitement continues with a rap off now taking place between Fluid and a team of rival video creators who believe they should have won. “It has an afterlife, with the rap off and the stories that are coming out,” Greenberg said. “They’re blogging about it. It’s the perfect example of using this channel in a way that resonates.”
Daniel Craig Embraced Openness For Role In Director Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer”
Daniel Craig is sitting in the restaurant of the Carlyle Hotel talking about how easy it can be to close yourself off to new experiences.
"We get older and maybe out of fear, we want to control the way we are in our lives. And I think it's sort of the enemy of art," Craig says. "You have to push against it. Whether you have success or not is irrelevant, but you have to try to push against it."
Craig, relaxed and unshaven, has the look of someone who has freed himself of a too snug tuxedo. Part of the abiding tension of his tenure as James Bond was this evident wrestling with the constraints that came along with it. Any such strains, though, would seem now to be completely out the window.
Since exiting that role, Craig, 56, has seemed eager to push himself in new directions. He performed "Macbeth" on Broadway. His drawling detective Benoit Blanc ("Halle Berry!") stole the show in "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery." And now, Craig gives arguably his most transformative performance as the William S. Burroughs avatar Lee in Luca Guadagnino's tender tale of love and longing in postwar Mexico City, "Queer."
Since the movie's Venice Film Festival premiere, it's been one of the fall's most talked about performances — for its explicit sex scenes, for its vulnerability and for its extremely un-007-ness.
"The role, they say, must have been a challenge or 'You're so brave to do this,'" Craig said in a recent interview alongside Guadagnino. "I kind of go, 'Eh, not really.' It's why I get up in the morning."
In "Queer," which A24 releases Wednesday in theaters, Craig again plays a well-traveled, sharply dressed, cocktail-drinking man. But the similarities with his most famous role stop there. Lee is an American expat living in 1950s... Read More