EVB/San Francisco’s MLS Represent campaign for Adidas, featuring 13 original songs aligned with the MLS teams, is being promoted by “Rock the Pitch,” a :30 video playing at www.adidas.com/MLS.
The spot features colorful soccer highlights interspersed with graphic calls to action that promote the songs and encourage viewers to create their own team videos.
“It’s part of a bigger campaign for Adidas and MLS,” said Jason Zada, EVB’s executive creative director and co-founder. “We created an original song for each team and partnered with bands in the 13 team cities.”
The goal of the campaign is to “give fans original music from their local teams and let them do what they want with it,” he said. “The music lets fans represent their team in a powerful way. They can go to the site and take the track and make their own video remix and play it before a game.” Fans go to Jumpcut.com/San Francisco, a division of Yahoo, to make their videos.
Among the bands participating are Bad Brains, Barenaked Ladies, The Rapture and Blackpool Lights. Rock River Music (RRM)/San Francisco managed the musical elements of the campaign.
The spot was produced with soccer footage provided by MLS. “We didn’t have to shoot it, it was done in post with After Effects and motion graphics work done in-house,” Zada said. The animated intro showing three players in action was created by the agency’s animators.
The soundtrack for the spot features clips from three of the team songs, according to Jeff Daniels, RRM’s president.
The spot is currently playing exclusively at the Adidas site, Zada said.
The goal of the campaign is to “get people excited about major league soccer and pull people in who have never seen a game. People are interested in the bands and the heart of the campaign is the songs. People can take the songs and play them and use them in their videos. It becomes part of the culture of soccer.”
Raoul Peck Resurrects A Once-Forgotten Anti-Apartheid Photographer In “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found”
When the photographer Ernest Cole died in 1990 at the age of 49 from pancreatic cancer at a Manhattan hospital, his death was little noted.
Cole, one of the most important chroniclers of apartheid-era South Africa, was by then mostly forgotten and penniless. Banned by his native country after the publication of his pioneering photography book "House of Bondage," Cole had emigrated in 1966 to the United States. But his life in exile gradually disintegrated into intermittent homelessness. A six-paragraph obituary in The New York Times ran alongside a list of death notices.
But Cole receives a vibrant and stirring resurrection in Raoul Peck's new film "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found," narrated in Cole's own words and voiced by LaKeith Stanfield. The film, which opens in theaters Friday, is laced throughout with Cole's photographs, many of them not before seen publicly.
As he did in his Oscar-nominated James Baldwin documentary "I Am Not Your Negro," the Haitian-born Peck shares screenwriting credit with his subject. "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is drawn from Cole's own writings. In words and images, Peck brings the tragic story of Cole to vivid life, reopening the lens through which Cole so perceptively saw injustice and humanity.
"Film is a political tool for me," Peck said in a recent interview over lunch in Manhattan. "My job is to go to the widest audience possible and try to give them something to help them understand where they are, what they are doing, what role they are playing. It's about my fight today. I don't care about the past."
"Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is a movie layered with meaning that goes beyond Cole's work. It asks questions not just about the societies Cole documented but of how he was treated as an artist,... Read More