Traditional baby strollers were slow and cumbersome, but Bugaboo/Amsterdam offers sleek, compact strollers that can be opened with one hand. A new model, the Bugaboo Bee, will be introduced in the U.S. in September, supported by a campaign that features a video that displays the stroller in “a marriage of styles–modern dance, Cirque du Soleil and a Busby Berkeley musical,” said director Vince Marcello of Tempered Entertainment/Los Angeles.
“Bugaboo Bee” is a 2:48 video that features four dads operating the strollers in a city setting that is overcome with an array of dancers, who transform the film into a work of dance theater. The four dads dance too, deftly pirouetting around the strollers and opening them smoothly, which demonstrates their functionality.
“People want a smaller, more nimble and agile solution and we asked how could we bring it to life?” said John Boiler, creative director at El Segundo, Calif. based ad agency 72andSunny. “We came up with the idea for a dance musical and focused on the dads who play with the strollers, get lost in the city and realize they forgot their babies, so that’s when the moms come in.” They appear near the end of the film and the couples insert their babies into the strollers and walk away smiling.
The four dads were chosen with demographics in mind; there’s “a geeky one from the Silicon Valley and an African American musician from the Village,” Marcello said. Meanwhile, the choreographer Lance MacDonald directed a cast of 20 dancers who merge with the cityscape and interact with the dads.
The film was shot at Hollywood studio The Lot in January with the Sony F900 camera. A key to the postproduction was color correction. “We lassoed the stroller colors to keep the strollers bright and made the colors around them more muted,” Marcello said.
The fast pace of the film is achieved by rhythmic shots from all angles, including overhead. “They wanted a fresh feel so we took modern dance and integrated it with Busby Berkeley-style overhead photography for a kaleidoscopic feel,” Marcello said. “We gave it a combination of modern dance and hip hop with a minimalist modern approach to dance.”
The film, which plays at Bugaboo.com, YouTube, Google Video and other social and entertainment sites, is part of a campaign that also includes print, web banners and outdoor ads. In September, the film will play on the Reuters billboard in Times Square, Boiler said.
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