The second season of Design Star, the HGTV show that will award a new show to the best of 11 home designers, starts July 22, prefaced by a campaign of on air :30s and “Vegas Sizzles,” a 1:43 video playing at www.hgtv.com/designstar.
The long-form video was shot in Las Vegas, where the show is set, and features three elements: casino footage at the beginning that establishes the tone; footage from the show; and footage from the title sequence, which wraps the piece.
Sedna Films/Santa Monica, Calif. shot the casino footage at the Aladdin Hotel. It begins with Clive Pearse, the star of the show, shuffling a deck of cards before the action moves to the casino floor, where a designer blows on a pair of dice and there’s some frenzied action around the table. “We did hand-held shots with the camera moving 360 degrees around the talent with the rest of the cast members playing craps in the background,” Dirk Detwiler, Sedna’s owner and executive producer, said. “The casino made it seem like there was a real game going on and then we moved to a black jack table and did the same thing.”
The next segment of the video consists of scenes from the show, with brief shots of the host and cast members in action on the stage and some of the design locations.
The video concludes with footage shot by Belief Design/Santa Monica, Calif., the design and live action studio that shot the title credits for the first season of the show. Belief did a new shoot in Vegas and green screened the designers so they could be incorporated into the existing title footage. “We green screened them so we could modify the look and put the new talent in the environment,” said Belief’s executive creative director Mike Goedecke. Belief also designed the typography that weaves throughout the spot, which includes the first names of the designers, who are shown in action shots near the end of the video.
The video fuses the excitement of Las Vegas with shots of the new cast, in the casino and on the set, to promote the second season of Design Star.
Jennifer Leitman, HGTV’s VP of brand promotion, said the video will run on HGTV.com and a range of other sites in a large media buy, including MSN, Comcast.net, YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video and MySpace.
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