When Zig/Toronto was shooting its Canadian TV campaign for Lavalife, which focused on the different kinds of men who are available on the dating network, one of the actors, a native Spanish speaker, couldn’t pronounce the word ‘orgasm.’ “He couldn’t say the word and we have 25 seconds of him trying to say it, so we used it as a viral video on YouTube,” said Martin Beauvais, Zig’s creative director.
“Funny Lavalife Outakes,” the piece that resulted from the shoot, is one of two videos playing online for the campaign. The other is “Guys in Groups,” a short :15 piece, which is much more conventional. The YouTube video features close-ups of the actor trying to pronounce the word, with hand motions from the director, trying to urge him to say it correctly.
“It was a normal TV shoot and we got so much material that we can put some of it online and some of it on TV and do different versions,” Beauvais said. “It’s tailor made for the mediums, so we can make sure we get the message across.”
The actor is one from a mix of men who promote the idea that there are three types of men available at Lavalife for relationships, casual dating and intimate encounters. While the TV ads offer group shots of the guys who represent each group, the viral video focuses on one of the actors, with a pronunciation problem.
“Virally, you have to corrupt a little and not tell a straight story,” said Brian Lee Hughes, the OPC/Toronto director. “The Latin lover hadn’t gotten all of his English together, so it was a behind-the-scenes outtake that made for a great viral video.”
Hughes shot the piece on film with a 16mm camera in a Toronto hotel.
The experience was a high point in commercial filmmaking for Hughes. “You shoot and that’s why you shoot. You get those nuggets of something unplanned and it can turn people on,” he said.
Lavalife’s new Canadian campaign includes TV, print and out of home transit ads. This is the first time the campaign has had an online component, Beauvais said. The campaign runs nationally in Canada through December, with media bought by Mindshare.
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