Co-heads of production
Wieden+Kennedy Portland
3) We’re incredibly proud of the wide range of work we’ve done this past year. From launching a chicken sandwich into space for KFC all while broadcasting it live, to giving the Internet a robotic Old Spice S.Q.U.I.D. to control via Twitch.tv in the name of helping boys become men, to creating a platform for the world to watch Nike get closer than anyone’s come to breaking the sub two-hour marathon. We also created an interactive music video for our friends Portugal. The Man that was filled with tools to empower social justice, which was named one of the best music videos of the year before the song rose to number one on the charts. It’s been a fun year pushing ourselves to work in new ways, across a variety of platforms and mediums, while protecting our fluid creative process to best serve our clients of all shapes and sizes.
4) We’ll continue to see more and more agencies and brands embracing opportunities to collaborate with platforms and publishers to reach their audiences on their turf. It’s about building experiences that connect with people in respectful and meaningful ways in spaces where they’re choosing to spend their time—all in the name of finding new ways to get more ideas made.
5) Simply put, we plan to seize every opportunity we get to create immersive storytelling experiences that generate a genuine emotional response with our audiences and hopefully have some sort of cultural impact. For us, it’s less about medium-specific goals but rather the excitement of the endless possibilities of what we could be making.
Review: Writer-Director Andrea Arnold’s “Bird”
"Is it too real for ya?" blares in the background of Andrea Arnold's latest film, "Bird," a 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) rides with her shirtless, tattoo-covered dad, Bug (Barry Keoghan), on his electric scooter past scenes of poverty in working-class Kent.
The song's question — courtesy of the Irish post-punk band Fontains D.C. — is an acute one for "Bird." Arnold's films ( "American Honey," "Fish Tank") are rigorous in their gritty naturalism. Her fiction films — this is her first in eight years — tend toward bleak, hand-held verité in rough-and-tumble real-world locations. Her last film, "Cow," documented a mother cow separated from her calf on a dairy farm.
Arnold specializes in capturing souls, human and otherwise, in soulless environments. A dream of something more is tantalizing just out of reach. In "American Honey," peace comes to Star (Sasha Lane) only when she submerges underwater.
In "Bird," though, this sense of otherworldly possibility is made flesh, or at least feathery. After a confusing night, Bailey awakens in a field where she encounters a strange figure in a skirt ( Franz Rogowski ) who arrives, like Mary Poppins, with a gust a wind. His name, he says, is Bird. He has a soft sweetness that doesn't otherwise exist in Bailey's hardscrabble and chaotic life.
She's skeptical of him at first, but he keeps lurking about, hovering gull-like on rooftops. He cranes his neck now and again like he's watching out for Bailey. And he does watch out for her, helping Bailey through a hard coming of age: the abusive boyfriend (James Nelson-Joyce) of her mother (Jasmine Jobson); her half brother (Jason Buda) slipping into vigilante violence; her father marrying a new girlfriend.
The introduction of surrealism has... Read More