Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb and Stanley Harrison, an actor with a long theatrical career, star in the Power and the Glory, a movie trailer sponsored by Glaceau vitaminwater that plays at Mcnabbisback.com and YouTube.
The return of the quarterback from an injury last year is the basis for the trailer, with vitaminwater playing an integrated role as “fuel for his recovery and mental fortitude,” said Steve O’Connell, creative director of Stick and Move/Philadelphia, the agency that created the trailer that was produced by Phasmatrope Studios/Haverford, PA.
The trailer format for the online video, the centerpiece of a campaign that also includes web, print and radio ads, “plays into the anticipation with McNabb’s return,” O’Connell said. “There’s a lot of parallel with a movie promotion and a launch day scenario.”
The trailer began playing August 10 to promote McNabb’s return on September 9, his first game this year.
The press quotes “Huh?” and “A movie?” put the trailer in perspective. It’s a humorous piece that shows scenes of McNabb working out and meditating before being confronted by Harrison, “some weird old guy” in a suit and bow tie, who confounds McNabb with his strange behavior.
“The most important thing was the casting,” said Phasmatrope director Guy Quinlan. “We were lucky to find the old guy and McNabb is a natural actor.”
But there was a lot more than acting involved. To make it look like a Hollywood film, “we had to make the environment abstract. We shot directly in floodlights with lots of smoke, a celestial setting where people came out of nowhere,” Quinlan said.
As the trailer progressed, “the focus was on the personalities and body language,” he said. “McNabb was like a gladiator in a fighting pose, he could leap into action in a second,” Quinlan said. Harrison was “the vehicle to the other side. The idea was to find someone he could play off to be believable.” They interact on a number of occasions, the most humorous in front of a large chalkboard with algebraic equations, which was staged to show McNabb is “serious, he’s brains as well as brawn,” Quinlan said.
Towards the end is a scene that shows ghosts of the gridiron, players in old fashioned uniforms who interact with shots of McNabb. The actors wore prosthetic masks, which gives their faces an eery quality that adds to the comedic tone of the trailer.
Quinlan opted for a Panasonic HVX 200 HD camera with Pro 35 Adaptor and 35mm prime lenses to give the trailer a cinematic look.
Vitaminwater makes a number of appearances in the trailer, with both characters drinking it, a vitaminwater production logo appearing near the beginning and a smaller logo shown with the credits at the end. “It’s more about McNabb,” O’Connell said. “Vitaminwater doesn’t tout themselves, so we put McNabb at the forefront telling his story in time for the first game.”
The trailer is directed to a Philadelphia audience, but it will have widespread appeal “because it’s web-based, McNabb is a national figure and it’s being talked about by bloggers,” O’Connell 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