“You need to be a master of your environment, not a servant to it,” says Chase Armitage. “When I realized this, that’s when everything changed. That’s when I did my first slip.”
‘Slip’ is the new video ad for Xbox, from AKQA/London and Partizan that shows Armitage performing his parkour slip moves on the streets of London to promote three new Xbox games, which are shown at the end of the video.
“In all the games you have to control your environment, so we extended the idea and made the story about the guy who does extraordinary things,” said James Hilton, AKQA’s co-founder/creative director. “He bends space and dimensions when he slips in and out of his moves.”
Armitage, a noted parkour athlete and editor of www.3run.co.uk, a free-running site, jumps off buildings and hurls through the air in a series of slip moves, as he narrates the video to explain the master your environment philosophy.
The video was shot in the Southbank section of London, which features classic modernist architecture “that looks good on camera and is good to jump around,” said Matt Tucker, Partizan’s producer.
Tucker said the shoot was straight ahead–“he led us around and we pointed the camera at him,” but it was a little more complicated than that because four cameras were used for different effects. A small pinhole camera recorded close body shots. “We hadn’t seen it before, no one had put a camera on a person who’s running,” Tucker said. A small Swedish Iconix camera provided “a different kind of texture, for more grainy low file shots,” he said. A standard Sony 900 camera produced “straight shots that weren’t specific,” he said. And a Weiff camera was used for slow motion footage.
The result is a video that shows an exciting parkour performance that ends with a shot of the three new games on a wall that Armitage leaps over. It is becoming customary not to show products in broadband video advertising until the end of the spot. As Hilton noted, “It’s about engaging people in the story, so we didn’t want to show the box shots all the time. The game market is flooded with in-game footage and every game looks the same. We’re interested in engaging the consumer in the story and maintaining engagement until the end. It makes it far more interesting.”
‘Slip’ plays at www.xbox.com/master and at YouTube.
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