Commercial and TV production company Picrow has named Tiffany Caprice as its head of marketing and new business development. She will report to company founder/director Peter Lang. Caprice is no stranger to Picrow, having helped Lang cast his decade-long branding campaign for USAA Insurance while working in a sr. role at Dan Bell Casting. Caprice also cast talent for independent films and commercials through Sanford Casting. Caprice said that Picrow, having produced content for Amazon (including Transparent, Mozart in the Jungle, Goliath, Patriot, I Love Dick), is poised for further expansion, growing the careers of its directors with varied projects. She will also look to develop more business-direct production and branding. As a hybrid studio, production and post house, Picrow can take on any portion of a project (production, post) or handle work from inception to finish. Spots, documentaries, TV shows, branding films and theatrical features get produced at Picrow, which also maintains the turn-key production collective The Hall which recently won a Gold ADDY for its “Unforgettable” Disney commercial campaign….VR production and post studio Bipolar Id has signed with UTA for film and TV representation, as well as indie firms Bespoke (Meredyth Mann) and Obsidian (Brady Hurt, Matthew Butcher) for commercial representation in the East Coast and Midwest, respectively. Bipolar continues to be repped commercially on the West Coast by ResourceLA (Dana Balkin). On the heels of a VR campaign for MINI and innovative 360° experiences for Google, Carnival Cruise Line, Toyota and Nissan, Bipolar is gearing up for further expansion into commercial markets and original content. Bipolar’s recent projects include a stereoscopic 360° experience for the launch of the Google Daydream VR headset, co-produced with B-Reel….
Review: Director Naoko Yamada’s “The Colors Within”
Kids movies so often bear little of the actual lived-in experience of growing up, but Naoko Yamada's luminous anime "The Colors Within" gently reverberates with the doubts and yearnings of young life.
Totsuko (voiced by Suzukawa Sayu) is a student at an all-girls Catholic boarding school. In the movie's opening, she explains how she experiences colors differently. She feels colors more than sees them, like an aura she senses from another person. "When I see a pretty color, my heart quickens," she says.
Totsuko, an exuberant, uncensored soul, has the tendency to blurt things out before she quite intends to. She accidentally tells a nun that her color is beautiful. In the midst of a dodgeball game, she's transfixed by the purple and yellow blur of a volleyball hurtling toward her — so much so that she's happily dazed when it smacks her in the head.
Like Totsuko, "The Colors Within" (in theaters Friday) wears its heart on its sleeve. Painted with a light, watercolor-y brush, the movie is softly impressionistic. In one typically poetic touch, a slinky brush stroke shapes the contours of a hillside horizon. That evocative sensibility connects with the movie's spiritual underpinnings. Totsuko prays "to have the serenity to accept the things she can't change." In "The Colors Within," a trio of young loners bond over what makes them uniquely themselves, while finding the courage to change, together.
The ball that knocks down Totsuko is thrown by a classmate named Kimi (Akari Takaishi), who not long after that gym class drops out of school — hounded, we're told, by rumors of a boyfriend. (Boys are off-limits for the boarding school.) Totsuko, curious what's happened to Kimi, sets out to find her, and eventually does. At a local used... Read More