BET’s “Follow the Leader” network identity campaign centers around a video from Harpoon Pictures/New York that follows the leader racing through the city to a comfortable living room where he can watch BET.
“Racing” isn’t really the word to use because the actor who plays the leader is Sébastien Foucan, who appeared in the James Bond film Casino Royale, and is the founder of parkour (free running), an extreme sport where participants move as fast as they can over and around any obstacle that comes in their way. To get to the TV, Foucan runs through crowds on a city street, strides across a ship in the harbor, leaps across roof tops and stops to raise his arms in triumph before he scales the face of a building to enter the apartment.
“Free running is not in the States yet, it’s the skateboarding of the future, the cutting edge before it breaks,” said Ola Kudu, BET’s vice president/creative director. Foucan’s opening chase scene in Casino Royale, a demonstration of parkour, “was one of the inspirations for the campaign and we pushed it further,” Kudu said.
The two-and-a-half-minute video began playing at Bet.com/onblast, the network’s video page, on Monday.
The video wasn’t easy to shoot because Foucan moved so fast. “The jumps were dangerous and risky, we had to shoot from three different angles for wide, close and mid shots,” said Michael Abt, Harpoon’s director. “He ran so fast on the difficult terrain, the only way to follow him was in a four wheel drive.”
The film looks like it was shot in an American city, but it was actually shot in Buenos Aires. It was shot there in April with Arriflex 435 cameras, Abt said.
The sound track is a hip hop song, Follow the Leader, by Eric B and Rakim, with echoing that repeats the title.
BET also plans to play the video with viral links at various locations, Kudu said. The long form video doesn’t play on TV, but shorter :30 and :60 second versions are playing on air along with network ids. Still images from the video are being used in print ads in the campaign that launched May 18.
AI-Assisted Works Can Get Copyright With Enough Human Creativity, According To U.S. Copyright Office
Artists can copyright works they made with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a new report by the U.S. Copyright Office that could further clear the way for the use of AI tools in Hollywood, the music industry and other creative fields.
The nation's copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress and is not part of the executive branch, receives about half a million copyright applications per year covering millions of individual works. It has increasingly been asked to register works that are AI-generated.
And while many of those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, the report issued Wednesday clarifies the office's approach as one based on what the top U.S. copyright official describes as the "centrality of human creativity" in authoring a work that warrants copyright protections.
"Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection," said a statement from Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who directs the office.
An AI-assisted work could be copyrightable if an artist's handiwork is perceptible. A human adapting an AI-generated output with "creative arrangements or modifications" could also make it fall under copyright protections.
The report follows a review that began in 2023 and fielded opinions from thousands of people that ranged from AI developers, to actors and country singers.
It shows the copyright office will continue to reject copyright claims for fully machine-generated content. A person simply prompting a chatbot or AI image generator to produce a work doesn't give that person the ability to copyright that work, according to the report. "Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine ...... Read More