The second season of Design Star, the HGTV show that will award a new show to the best of 11 home designers, starts July 22, prefaced by a campaign of on air :30s and “Vegas Sizzles,” a 1:43 video playing at www.hgtv.com/designstar.
The long-form video was shot in Las Vegas, where the show is set, and features three elements: casino footage at the beginning that establishes the tone; footage from the show; and footage from the title sequence, which wraps the piece.
Sedna Films/Santa Monica, Calif. shot the casino footage at the Aladdin Hotel. It begins with Clive Pearse, the star of the show, shuffling a deck of cards before the action moves to the casino floor, where a designer blows on a pair of dice and there’s some frenzied action around the table. “We did hand-held shots with the camera moving 360 degrees around the talent with the rest of the cast members playing craps in the background,” Dirk Detwiler, Sedna’s owner and executive producer, said. “The casino made it seem like there was a real game going on and then we moved to a black jack table and did the same thing.”
The next segment of the video consists of scenes from the show, with brief shots of the host and cast members in action on the stage and some of the design locations.
The video concludes with footage shot by Belief Design/Santa Monica, Calif., the design and live action studio that shot the title credits for the first season of the show. Belief did a new shoot in Vegas and green screened the designers so they could be incorporated into the existing title footage. “We green screened them so we could modify the look and put the new talent in the environment,” said Belief’s executive creative director Mike Goedecke. Belief also designed the typography that weaves throughout the spot, which includes the first names of the designers, who are shown in action shots near the end of the video.
The video fuses the excitement of Las Vegas with shots of the new cast, in the casino and on the set, to promote the second season of Design Star.
Jennifer Leitman, HGTV’s VP of brand promotion, said the video will run on HGTV.com and a range of other sites in a large media buy, including MSN, Comcast.net, YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video and MySpace.
Supreme Court Allows Multibillion-Dollar Class Action Lawsuit To Proceed Against Meta
The Supreme Court is allowing a multibillion-dollar class action investors' lawsuit to proceed against Facebook parent Meta, stemming from the privacy scandal involving the Cambridge Analytica political consulting firm.
The justices heard arguments in November in Meta's bid to shut down the lawsuit. On Friday, they decided that they were wrong to take up the case in the first place.
The high court dismissed the company's appeal, leaving in place an appellate ruling allowing the case to go forward.
Investors allege that Meta did not fully disclose the risks that Facebook users' personal information would be misused by Cambridge Analytica, a firm that supported Donald Trump 's first successful Republican presidential campaign in 2016.
Inadequacy of the disclosures led to two significant price drops in the price of the company's shares in 2018, after the public learned about the extent of the privacy scandal, the investors say.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company was disappointed by the court's action. "The plaintiff's claims are baseless and we will continue to defend ourselves as this case is considered by the District Court," Stone said in an emailed statement.
Meta already has paid a $5.1 billion fine and reached a $725 million privacy settlement with users.
Cambridge Analytica had ties to Trump political strategist Steve Bannon. It had paid a Facebook app developer for access to the personal information of about 87 million Facebook users. That data was then used to target U.S. voters during the 2016 campaign.
The lawsuit is one of two high court cases involving class-action lawsuits against tech companies. The justices also are wrestling with whether to shut down a class action against Nvidia.... Read More