Sony PSP’s Syphon Filter: Logan’s Shadow video game features a number of new spy fighting maneuvers that Gabe Logan, the game’s hero, uses to battle the Somali pirates. TBWAChiatDay/LA could have shown the new maneuvers in detail with live game footage. “But we had one random viral idea,” said agency copywriter Rob Calabro. “We thought it would be funny if we had one guy who studied the game so much that he created an online self defense course based on the motion of the game that was completely inapplicable to real life.”
And Agent Kevin 78 DramaHawk was born.
The video campaign for Syphon Filter, which launched Jan. 9, features 13 DramaHawk homemade videos featuring Kevin in his room and outside his house demonstrating the new maneuvers in his own way. In the game, Logan uses a spear gun to attack spies under water. Kevin stores his spear gun under his car and uses it to shoot the oxygen box (“I call it ox box”) of his rival in his backyard. “It doesn’t make sense and he’s a little bit disconnected, but it’s a funny way to show the new moves from the game,” Calabro said.
Six two to three-minute videos show Kevin demonstrating new spy fighting maneuvers. The campaign also includes a series of shorter videos, which Calabro calls “orphans,” which were conceptualized by Matt Lenski, who directed the videos for Epoch Films/bicoastal. “His idea was to have unbranded shorter pieces that would pique the interest of non-gamers,” Calabro said. “They can watch a 10-second video and see that it’s linked to other videos, which they can check out.” Lenski called the orphans “esoteric comments that build into Kevin’s world.”
Kevin’s world turns out to be the guiding principle of the video series. “We made sure to stick to one rule—what would Kevin do,” Lenski said. “He’s the fan of the game and we had to stick to that mind frame.”
Lenski shot the films in Echo Park, Eagle Rock and other East LA locations, “anywhere we could get away with blowing stuff up easily,” he said. In Highly Explosive, Kevin blows up a cantaloupe, a bag of flour and an old car. “We took a Glock 9mm with blanks and rigged the cantaloupe and bag of flour with explosives,” Lenski said. As for how he shot the car explosion, “It proves the art direction was spot on,” he said. “He shot at the car and we tried to make the explosion as fake as possible, like he’d just done the effect on his home computer. It was supposed to look hokey.”
The idea was to make the videos look like Kevin had made them himself and “he wouldn’t spend much on a video camera, so we went out and bought two inexpensive ones,” he said. Sony DCR-HC38 Mini DV camcorders were used.
The six main videos in the series feature game footage clips at the very end. Instead of playing in vivid clarity, they are rough, “because Kevin wouldn’t be able to get high rez QuickTimes but he could shoot it off his PSP screen as he was playing,” Lenski said. “So we shot it off the PSP screen with the inexpensive video camera.”
The videos don’t play on a Sony PSP site. “YouTube is the hub of it,” Calabro said. A YouTube page features the entire series. Yahoo Video, Dailymotion, Metacafe and Pspfanboy are also being used. “We’re trying to keep it very viral. We want it to reach gamers, so we’re also going to play them on game blogs,” he said.
DramaHawk is Johnny Sollis, a New York actor whom Calabro praised for his improvisational skills. “The campaign was so run and gun we couldn’t worry about specific lines. It was do it your own way and he was perfect for that,” he said. “The way we wrote the character was different from where he took it. He didn’t become DramaHawk. DramaHawk became him.”
Supreme Court Allows Multibillion-Dollar Class Action Lawsuit To Proceed Against Meta
The Supreme Court is allowing a multibillion-dollar class action investors' lawsuit to proceed against Facebook parent Meta, stemming from the privacy scandal involving the Cambridge Analytica political consulting firm.
The justices heard arguments in November in Meta's bid to shut down the lawsuit. On Friday, they decided that they were wrong to take up the case in the first place.
The high court dismissed the company's appeal, leaving in place an appellate ruling allowing the case to go forward.
Investors allege that Meta did not fully disclose the risks that Facebook users' personal information would be misused by Cambridge Analytica, a firm that supported Donald Trump 's first successful Republican presidential campaign in 2016.
Inadequacy of the disclosures led to two significant price drops in the price of the company's shares in 2018, after the public learned about the extent of the privacy scandal, the investors say.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company was disappointed by the court's action. "The plaintiff's claims are baseless and we will continue to defend ourselves as this case is considered by the District Court," Stone said in an emailed statement.
Meta already has paid a $5.1 billion fine and reached a $725 million privacy settlement with users.
Cambridge Analytica had ties to Trump political strategist Steve Bannon. It had paid a Facebook app developer for access to the personal information of about 87 million Facebook users. That data was then used to target U.S. voters during the 2016 campaign.
The lawsuit is one of two high court cases involving class-action lawsuits against tech companies. The justices also are wrestling with whether to shut down a class action against Nvidia.... Read More