“You need to be a master of your environment, not a servant to it,” says Chase Armitage. “When I realized this, that’s when everything changed. That’s when I did my first slip.”
‘Slip’ is the new video ad for Xbox, from AKQA/London and Partizan that shows Armitage performing his parkour slip moves on the streets of London to promote three new Xbox games, which are shown at the end of the video.
“In all the games you have to control your environment, so we extended the idea and made the story about the guy who does extraordinary things,” said James Hilton, AKQA’s co-founder/creative director. “He bends space and dimensions when he slips in and out of his moves.”
Armitage, a noted parkour athlete and editor of www.3run.co.uk, a free-running site, jumps off buildings and hurls through the air in a series of slip moves, as he narrates the video to explain the master your environment philosophy.
The video was shot in the Southbank section of London, which features classic modernist architecture “that looks good on camera and is good to jump around,” said Matt Tucker, Partizan’s producer.
Tucker said the shoot was straight ahead–“he led us around and we pointed the camera at him,” but it was a little more complicated than that because four cameras were used for different effects. A small pinhole camera recorded close body shots. “We hadn’t seen it before, no one had put a camera on a person who’s running,” Tucker said. A small Swedish Iconix camera provided “a different kind of texture, for more grainy low file shots,” he said. A standard Sony 900 camera produced “straight shots that weren’t specific,” he said. And a Weiff camera was used for slow motion footage.
The result is a video that shows an exciting parkour performance that ends with a shot of the three new games on a wall that Armitage leaps over. It is becoming customary not to show products in broadband video advertising until the end of the spot. As Hilton noted, “It’s about engaging people in the story, so we didn’t want to show the box shots all the time. The game market is flooded with in-game footage and every game looks the same. We’re interested in engaging the consumer in the story and maintaining engagement until the end. It makes it far more interesting.”
‘Slip’ plays at www.xbox.com/master and at YouTube.
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