By Robert Goldrich
The search is underway for creatives to serve on Team USA, which will represent the country in the Young Creative Competition that takes place annually at the Cannes International Advertising Festival.
The upcoming Team USA competition for young creatives is open to art directors and copywriters who are no more than 28 years old as of June 15, 2005. And for the first time, the U.S. team will also include a Web designer, with the same age requirement.
Other prerequisites include that candidates be Mac-literate and U.S. citizens. Web designers must be literate in Adobe. Art directors and copywriters must have those titles as working professionals. Each creative does not have to work at the same agency, but can only enter as a member of one team.
Entrants have to register their written request for a creative brief, accompanied by their e-mail addresses, with Susan Lilley at slilley@usatoday.com by March 24. They can also register via fax (212 715-2129) or by mail to Lilley’s attention (USA Today, 535 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10022). Qualifying teams will receive a creative brief for a pro-bono account via e-mail on March 28 and have one week to prepare a finished print or banner ad.
Based on those ads, the winning team will be selected by a noted group of judges in New York during the week of April 18. That winning creative ensemble will become Team USA and be awarded an all-expenses paid trip to the 52nd International Advertising Festival in Cannes (including airfare, hotel accommodations, Festival credentials, tickets for award ceremonies).
At Cannes, the Young Creative Competition will take place on June 18. Teams from around the world will be briefed that day and have 24 hours to create an ad and a Web site for a pro-bono client. Members of the Cannes international jury will review the Young Creative work and select the winning team, which will be announced at the Press & Outdoor Awards.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