Saville Productions has signed spot director Greg Gray for exclusive representation in the U.S. market.
Saville Productions has signed spot director Greg Gray for exclusive representation in the U.S. market. He broke into directing with South Africa house Velocity in the late 1990s, breaking through with his BMW “Free Diver” campaign. His other notable credits include commercials for Guinness, Ford, Nike, Axe and Virgin Upper Class. For the latter, Gray helmed the lauded “Love Story”…..Method Studios, which maintains shops on both coasts and in London, has bolstered its talent pool at its New York facility with the hiring of VFX supervisor Peter Marin and senior Flame artist Martin Lazaro. Marin has worked in visual effects since 1997, when he first joined The Mill as a Flame artist. Since then, Marin has served as VFX supervisor at a number of leading facilities, including Framestore CFC in Reykjavik, Iceland, Animal Logic, and Sweden's Redrum, where he worked on the 2009 Cannes Lion Grand Prix winner, “Carousel.” From 2002-2008, Marin was partner, senior creative artist, VFX supervisor and head of 2D and 3D at Stockholm Postproduction, before which he worked on feature projects such as Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Black Hawk Down at Mill Film in London. A seasoned VFX talent with over 15 years of experience, Lazaro got his start in the industry as a graphic designer at Metrovision in Buenos Aires, Argentina, designing commercials and TV shows before forming his own VFX boutique, Dynamo Post. After that, Lazaro moved to Spain, where he worked on numerous high-end VFX commercials and feature film projects. Prior to joining Method, Lazaro headed the VFX department as a Flame artist/VFX supervisor at wild(child) and Resident Creative Studio in NYC, where in addition to commercials for clients such as AT&T and Sirius/XM, he worked on music videos for Coldplay, Jay-Z, Kanye West and the Black Eyed Peas, as well as the opening titles for HBO's Entourage….RIOT Atlanta has added Smoke artist Mike Wardner to its talent roster. He comes over from Shooters Post and Transfer, where he edited both offline and online, and expanded his range working on commercials for national and regional campaigns, and feature films…..
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More