SHORT TAKES….This spot introduces us to two brothers who share everything—including KFC’s new Mediterranean Bites—as they enjoy summer adventures together, driving to them on the older sibling’s motorcycle. The young boy idolizes his older sibling and is so excited to see him as he drives up each morning to pick him up for their next adventure.
The two are totally inseparable until one day the older lad drives up, accompanied by a girl on another motorcycle. The younger sibling is heartbroken as he sees the couple dash away. But it turns out that his big bro hadn’t forgotten him, returning to pick him up—now it’s a threesome who will enjoy their time together.
Michael Pearce of production house Pulse directed this spot for BBH London. Ben Kracun was the DP. Billy Mead of tenthree, London, edited “Brothers,” with The Mill London handling postproduction.
AFI Scores Student Academy Award Noms
The AFI Conservatory topped all film schools with four of the seven nominations in the Narrative category for the 2015 Student Academy Awards.
The directors behind the four nominated films are all from the AFI Class of 2014. They are director Stefan Kubicki for Against Night, Henry Hughes for Day One, Bennett Lasseter for Stealth, and Jeremy Cloe for This Way Up.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences administers the Student Academy Awards, which is an annual nationwide competition for college and university filmmakers that recognizes this country’s most promising new filmmakers. Winners will be announced September 17, 2015.
The strong showing at the Student Academy Awards continues a streak for AFI Conservatory students which has seen them win: the 2015 Cannes Film Festival’s Cinéfondation First Prize and the Emerging Filmmaker Showcase Honorable Mention; five wins at the 36th College Television Awards; two wins at the 2014 DGA Student Film Awards, the BAFTA U.S. Student Film Award at the 12th annual BAFTA U.S. Student Film Awards and a bronze medal at the 2014 Student Academy Awards.
People On The Move…
Commercial and creative director Charles Nordeen has joined Eskimo. Prior to coming aboard the Eskimo studio, Nordeen was a founding partner of Light of Day, a design, VFX and live-action studio.
While there he served in a creative director and director capacity working with varied brands (Newcastle, NY Lottery) and agencies (DDB NY). Already at Eskimo he directed, in collaboration with 360i, Nestle’s “Natural Bliss” for Coffee-Mate. Shot in Manhattan’s Lower East Side within a pop-up Nestle coffee shop, the web piece features body-painted “nude” baristas handing out coffee enhanced with Coffee-Mate all-natural creamer much to the surprise and chagrin of customers. Nordeen earned inclusion into SHOOT’s 2014 New Director Showcase….Experiential design agency Fake Love has hired Omer Shapira as its new lead VR visualist. Shapira comes over from Framestore, where he led projects for its VR software division. Previously he worked with The NYU Media Research Lab and the MIT Media Lab….
Review: Writer-Director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance”
In its first two hours, "The Substance" is a well-made, entertaining movie. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat treats audiences to a heavy dose of biting social commentary on ageism and sexism in Hollywood, with a spoonful of sugar- and sparkle-doused body horror.
But the film's deliciously unhinged, blood-soaked and inevitably polarizing third act is what makes it unforgettable.
What begins as a dread-inducing but still relatively palatable sci-fi flick spirals deeper into absurdism and violence, eventually erupting — quite literally — into a full-blown monster movie. Let the viewer decide who the monster is.
Fargeat — who won best screenplay at this year's Cannes Film Festival — has been vocal about her reverence for "The Fly" director David Cronenberg, and fans of the godfather of body horror will see his unmistakable influence. But "The Substance" is also wholly unique and benefits from Fargeat's perspective, which, according to the French filmmaker, has involved extensive grappling with her own relationship to her body and society's scrutiny.
"The Substance" tells the story of Elisabeth Sparkle, a famed aerobics instructor with a televised show, played by a powerfully vulnerable Demi Moore. Sparkle is fired on her 50th birthday by a ruthless executive — a perfectly cast Dennis Quaid, who nails sleazy and gross.
Feeling rejected by a town that once loved her and despairing over her bygone star power, Sparkle learns from a handsome young nurse about a black-market drug that promises to create a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of its user. Though she initially tosses the phone number in the trash, she soon fishes it out in a desperate panic and places an order.
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