By Ken Liebeskind
SAN DIEGO --To promote a new camcorder that provides filmmakers with an easy way to create user generated content, JVC ran a contest at a user generated site for filmmakers to shoot a JVC commercial. The winning spot played on national TV and is running online.
The contest ran at VMIX.com, the site run by VMIX Media that plays independently produced videos and music.
“User generated content is the rage among marketers and we want to do it as an element in our campaign to get our message out and be cutting edge,” said Karl Bearnarth, JVC’s senior vice president of marketing. “VMIX has a robust site that enables consumers to share their content. We make a product that makes it easy to develop user generated content, so it worked well on the site.”
The new product is the Everio, the first tapeless camcorder that records onto a hard disc drive. “They can shoot their videos, edit them on a PC or Mac and upload them to sites for sharing or entering a contest like this,” Bearnarth said.
The contest ran from October to late December and generated over 80 entries. The winner was Martin Whittier, an aspiring filmmaker from Perryville, MD who operates Brumar Films, a production company. The winning spot, called “Danger Man,” featured a motorcyclist driving up a steep hill in a park before the camera is shown. Whittier used a JVC GY-HD100U camera, jvc a 720 hi def camcorder, for the shoot.
The spot played on Spike TV on Feb. 8 during the show Pros vs. Joes. It is also running on the VMIX and JVC websites.
The contest was an example of a campaign from VMIX, which “works with major brands to develop an online presence,” according to the company’s CEO Greg Kostello. “Companies come up with a great idea but don’t have the interactive team or the time to do it. We can get it up and running quickly.”
“JVC was looking to put their brand on the site and connect with new users to get the message out on the new product and have an interactive experience you can’t find anywhere else on the Net,” said David Brown, VMIX’s VP of brand entertainment.
Review: Writer-Director Andrea Arnold’s “Bird”
"Is it too real for ya?" blares in the background of Andrea Arnold's latest film, "Bird," a 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) rides with her shirtless, tattoo-covered dad, Bug (Barry Keoghan), on his electric scooter past scenes of poverty in working-class Kent.
The song's question — courtesy of the Irish post-punk band Fontains D.C. — is an acute one for "Bird." Arnold's films ( "American Honey," "Fish Tank") are rigorous in their gritty naturalism. Her fiction films — this is her first in eight years — tend toward bleak, hand-held verité in rough-and-tumble real-world locations. Her last film, "Cow," documented a mother cow separated from her calf on a dairy farm.
Arnold specializes in capturing souls, human and otherwise, in soulless environments. A dream of something more is tantalizing just out of reach. In "American Honey," peace comes to Star (Sasha Lane) only when she submerges underwater.
In "Bird," though, this sense of otherworldly possibility is made flesh, or at least feathery. After a confusing night, Bailey awakens in a field where she encounters a strange figure in a skirt ( Franz Rogowski ) who arrives, like Mary Poppins, with a gust a wind. His name, he says, is Bird. He has a soft sweetness that doesn't otherwise exist in Bailey's hardscrabble and chaotic life.
She's skeptical of him at first, but he keeps lurking about, hovering gull-like on rooftops. He cranes his neck now and again like he's watching out for Bailey. And he does watch out for her, helping Bailey through a hard coming of age: the abusive boyfriend (James Nelson-Joyce) of her mother (Jasmine Jobson); her half brother (Jason Buda) slipping into vigilante violence; her father marrying a new girlfriend.
The introduction of surrealism has... Read More