Creative services company BigStar has added creative director John Leamy to its team. Leamy is an award-winning, multidisciplinary creative who is best known for his design, live show graphics, film, and print work. He brings more than two decades of experience in shaping advertising, marketing, and branding campaigns for such clients as ABC, Red Bull, MGM Grand, and LG. Leamy is currently working on the title design and branding for the upcoming PBS series, Chasing the Moon.
Entering its 15th year of business, BigStar with its hiring of Leamy rounds out a benchmark 2018 in which the company has expanded its footprint as an entertainment marketing and branding partner of major TV networks and OTT content providers, tallying blockbuster show launches and campaigns for FX, HBO, ABC, Amazon, AMC, Turner, and Syfy. Meanwhile, BigStar continues to increase its slate of feature film and documentary series work. The team recently made waves with the 2018 top-grossing indie, Free Solo, from National Geographic, creating the documentary’s main titles, VFX sequences, and graphics package.
Leamy has a history with BigStar founder/ECD Josh Norton. Their relationship began more than 20 years ago when the two were freelancers, working side-by-side at various creative studios. Since then, the two have stayed in touch and were waiting for the right opportunity to work together again. Most recently, Leamy was ECD at Leroy & Clarkson, serving at the helm of projects for clients such as National Geographic, Nasdaq, Nickelodeon, and ABC News. Prior to that, he was creative director at Spontaneous, a position he held for eight years while leading projects for a wide variety of clients, such as AT&T, Wendy’s, Maybelline, and Lockheed Martin. In addition, he was a long-time creative partner of U2 creating live concert visuals, music video, film, and print content for the seminal rock band. Leamy started his career as a freelance artist at Imaginary Forces, RadicalMedia, Freestyle Collective, and MTV, among others.
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.
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