There’s more to see than ever before on the Sharp Aquos LCD TV Web site. With a series of HD Web films, visitors can discover how scientist Peter Smith directs his passion for imaging and the environment to study the history of water on Mars and what it may teach us about Earth, or later this fall, experience the world through the eyes of world-renowned director Michel Gondry, known for his visual techniques in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and various music videos and TV spots.
With the new www.moretosee.com site, a collaboration between agencies Wieden + Kennedy, New York and Tokyo, and R/GA, New York, Sharp AQUOS wanted to promote its market leadership in the flat-screen LCD television space and its commitment to being a forward-thinking business.
“R/GA proposed expanding the existing Sharp AQUOS site into a more experiential one that delves more deeply into the AQUOS tagline ‘There’s more to see’ by featuring cultural ‘visionaries’ who embody the concept of the tagline. This site was developed around a single basic principle: that technology in the service of creativity–be it the arts, science or design–changes the way we see, experience and live in the world. Visionaries were selected based on their work, their cultural resonance and the ability to map their work to a specific set of AQUOS features,” said Adam Jackson, art director, R/GA. New visionaries will be added over the course of 2007.
After R/GA secured Smith, the principal investigator for the Phoenix Mission to Mars, scheduled to launch in August 2007, the team chose Peter Sillen of Washington Square Films, known for his expertise in directing documentary-style films, to shoot the films in Tucson, Ariz. The R/GA team wrote a script/interview brief with a synopsis of each of the five 1:20 videos in the Smith series and questions to ask. (Three are currently on view and more will be added.)
“When I’m working with an agency, I need some direction in terms of how technical we want to get in subject matter and copywriter Cary Lawson was really great in terms of coming up with the bullet points of the campaign and the major themes we were hitting on,” said director Sillen.
“They weren’t necessarily dictated from Sharp but more from the individual who we were shooting–which I think is really the strength of the campaign. We are not trying to put words into people’s mouths; it’s people playing to what they do best. There is something really nice that is built into it that allows each person to be their own individual and that drives the creative of it.”
He said creating a narrative for a nonlinear environment like the Web posed different challenges than shooting a spot. “Most of the time we’ll be trying to create one cohesive piece whether it’s for a spot or a long form, but with this project you almost want each one to be able to exist as its own independent piece because programming for the Web creates more random access.
“It’s almost as if you are reading a book from a series, where they somehow recount the basics of the plot so if you didn’t read the first book you are not lost in the second. There was a little bit of redundancy, which is not bad, but a little different than just making a singular spot.”
Planning helped the process. Before filming and while still in the early design phase, R/GA had an in-person meeting with Smith to learn about his work and made several follow-up phone calls. “This made it easy to tell the stories we wanted to tell, determine how they would relate to Sharp AQUOS features and see how it would all fold together on the Web,” Jackson said.
As Smith shared stories, an opportunity arose to incorporate historical footage from the Pathfinder Mission to Mars in 1997. CG models of the Phoenix Mission were also brought into the films. In the end, there were more than 40 hours of footage to work with. The video was shot at 720p in HD format and integrated into the site with standard and 3D design elements. “From R/GA’s perspective, the challenge was what not to include, because Smith was eloquent and had a lot of good sound bytes,” Lawson said.
Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Cartoonist and Writer, Dies At 95
Jules Feiffer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and writer whose prolific output ranged from a long-running comic strip to plays, screenplays and children's books, died Friday. He was 95 and, true to his seemingly tireless form, published his last book just four months ago.
Feiffer's wife, writer JZ Holden, said Tuesday that he died of congestive heart failure at their home in Richfield Springs, New York, and was surrounded by friends, the couple's two cats and his recent artwork.
Holden said her husband had been ill for a couple of years, "but he was sharp and strong up until the very end. And funny."
Artistically limber, Feiffer hopscotched among numerous forms of expression, chronicling the curiosity of childhood, urban angst and other societal currents. To each he brought a sharp wit and acute observations of the personal and political relations that defined his readers' lives.
As Feiffer explained to the Chicago Tribune in 2002, his work dealt with "communication and the breakdown thereof, between men and women, parents and children, a government and its citizens, and the individual not dealing so well with authority."
Feiffer won the United States' most prominent awards in journalism and filmmaking, taking home a 1986 Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons and "Munro," an animated short film he wrote, won a 1961 Academy Award. The Library of Congress held a retrospective of his work in 1996.
"My goal is to make people think, to make them feel and, along the way, to make them smile if not laugh," Feiffer told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1998. "Humor seems to me one of the best ways of espousing ideas. It gets people to listen with their guard down."
Feiffer was born on Jan. 26, 1929, in the Bronx. From... Read More