Branding and content creation company Gravity has brought aboard Alex Postelnicu–whose experience spans design, VFX, live action and concept development–as creative director. Announcement of the hire was made by Zviah Eldar, Gravity’s CEO/chief creative officer.
Postelnicu’s background spans permalancer gigs with such studios as Brand New School, Psyop, MassMarket, Humble, The Wilderness and Publicis. He has also had occasion to freelance at such shops as Digital Kitchen, Stardust and Superfad.
Bob Samuel, chief marketing officer and executive producer at Gravity, cited Postelnicu’s comfort level serving in varied capacities. “Alex is equally comfortable on set directing, working as a creative design director, or compositing in Flame with a room full of clients,” said Samuel who cited Postelnicu’s “international background” (which includes staff and permalance tenures at Switzerland’s Ultra Images) as helping him “to develop the ability to create functional, smart and effective communication design that has a positive response, and that can be used in advertising, fashion, architecture, industrial design or art.”
Among Postelnicu’s credits are projects for Volkswagen, Samsung, HP, Axe, Verizon, Toyota, Dodge, Porsche, Chase, the New York Stock Exchange and Zurich Financial, among others. He has taken on such roles over the years as art director, live-action director, VFX supervisor, creative director, lead designer, Flame artist, storyboard and concept artist.
Review: Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator II”
Rome teeters on the brink in Ridley Scott's "Gladiator II." Its fall is said to be imminent. The dream it once symbolized is dead. The once high-minded ideals of the Roman Empire have deteriorated across a venal land now ruled by a pale-faced emperor.
On the throne is Geta (Joseph Quinn), who sits alongside his sniveling brother, Caracalla (Fred Hechinger). The heart of this Rome, of course, is the Coliseum, where throngs cheer for the gladiators who fight and die. There, the ageless Scott remains remarkably at home. The arena, with its eruptions of spectacle and violence, is a stand in for the director's own vision of the big screen: Go big or go home.
This dichotomy — a fallen society and its insatiable need for entertainment — is the clever and not altogether flattering backdrop of the "Gladiator" films. Part two, set 20 years after the events of the first movie, brings a new combatant to the Coliseum — a mysterious outsider named Lucius Verus, played by Paul Mescal. And to answer the inevitable question, yes. Yes, I was quite entertained.
"Gladiator II" isn't quite the prestige film the first one, a best-picture winner, was in 2001. It's more a swaggering, sword-and-sandal epic that prizes the need to entertain above all else. No one in "Gladiator II" understands that more than Denzel Washington. His performance as the Machiavellian power broker Macrinus is a delicious blur of robes and grins – so compellingly over-the-top that he nearly reaches 1990s Al Pacino standards.
Inside this Rome are scattered interests in toppling it, including Marcus Acacius, a decorated general who has just returned from a successful campaign taking Numidia in northwest Africa. (That siege makes the movie's blistering opening, with an armada... Read More