By Ken Liebeskind
LONDON --“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.
Review: Writer-Director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance”
In its first two hours, "The Substance" is a well-made, entertaining movie. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat treats audiences to a heavy dose of biting social commentary on ageism and sexism in Hollywood, with a spoonful of sugar- and sparkle-doused body horror.
But the film's deliciously unhinged, blood-soaked and inevitably polarizing third act is what makes it unforgettable.
What begins as a dread-inducing but still relatively palatable sci-fi flick spirals deeper into absurdism and violence, eventually erupting — quite literally — into a full-blown monster movie. Let the viewer decide who the monster is.
Fargeat — who won best screenplay at this year's Cannes Film Festival — has been vocal about her reverence for "The Fly" director David Cronenberg, and fans of the godfather of body horror will see his unmistakable influence. But "The Substance" is also wholly unique and benefits from Fargeat's perspective, which, according to the French filmmaker, has involved extensive grappling with her own relationship to her body and society's scrutiny.
"The Substance" tells the story of Elisabeth Sparkle, a famed aerobics instructor with a televised show, played by a powerfully vulnerable Demi Moore. Sparkle is fired on her 50th birthday by a ruthless executive — a perfectly cast Dennis Quaid, who nails sleazy and gross.
Feeling rejected by a town that once loved her and despairing over her bygone star power, Sparkle learns from a handsome young nurse about a black-market drug that promises to create a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of its user. Though she initially tosses the phone number in the trash, she soon fishes it out in a desperate panic and places an order.
The one rule to follow is that... Read More