To promote Windows Server 2008, the most recent release of the Microsoft Windows Server line of operating systems, which was released February 27, a series of three video ads starring a computer-generated robot character are playing at www.serverunleashed.com and other sites. The spots were created by McCann Erickson/San Francisco and produced by Digital Domain/Venice, Calif.
“It’s a major launch for Microsoft, an updated version of their enterprise software and they needed a big campaign, so we came up with the metaphor of the robot,” said Michael Furlong, a creative director at McCann. “The campaign is about reliability and manageability, which we represented with the strength and flexibility of the robot.”
In spots entitled “Command Line,” “Crouching Robot” and “Exerciser,” the robot, nicknamed IT247, is the server, which runs and jumps around the industrial space as two men discuss it.
Digital Domain used motion capture to set up the robot’s moves. “We wanted to have the robot be able to do robotic things and have the flavor of a human being,” said Fred Raimondi, the Digital Domain director. “Rather than have an animator do it, we recorded the motions of a guy in a suit with sensors on his body and applied it to the robot model.” Alex Chansky, an actor who doubled for Spiderman in two movies and has appeared in martial arts films, was filmed in the motion capture sequence.
The two men were shot on green screen with everything else in the spots in 3D. The spots were shot with an Arri D4 digital camera. “It’s fully digital and we didn’t use film,” Raimondi said.
The spots are all :30s but they’re not running on TV in the U.S., although they may in international markets. “Different markets will adapt them for their own usage,” Furlong said. “Here, we’re trying to target IT pros and it’s easier to get them online.” The U.S. campaign runs at www.serverunleashed.com and a number of sites in a media buy, including gadget sites Gizmodo and Crunchgear.
The U.S. campaign also includes two-page magazine spreads.
Furlong said he worked with the McCann office in Japan to coordinate the robot movements because “they’re very sensitive to how robots are represented.” Robots have appeared in ads for Honda and Nissan in Japan, “so we had to make sure the robot was unique,” he said.
Raoul Peck Resurrects A Once-Forgotten Anti-Apartheid Photographer In “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found”
When the photographer Ernest Cole died in 1990 at the age of 49 from pancreatic cancer at a Manhattan hospital, his death was little noted.
Cole, one of the most important chroniclers of apartheid-era South Africa, was by then mostly forgotten and penniless. Banned by his native country after the publication of his pioneering photography book "House of Bondage," Cole had emigrated in 1966 to the United States. But his life in exile gradually disintegrated into intermittent homelessness. A six-paragraph obituary in The New York Times ran alongside a list of death notices.
But Cole receives a vibrant and stirring resurrection in Raoul Peck's new film "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found," narrated in Cole's own words and voiced by LaKeith Stanfield. The film, which opens in theaters Friday, is laced throughout with Cole's photographs, many of them not before seen publicly.
As he did in his Oscar-nominated James Baldwin documentary "I Am Not Your Negro," the Haitian-born Peck shares screenwriting credit with his subject. "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is drawn from Cole's own writings. In words and images, Peck brings the tragic story of Cole to vivid life, reopening the lens through which Cole so perceptively saw injustice and humanity.
"Film is a political tool for me," Peck said in a recent interview over lunch in Manhattan. "My job is to go to the widest audience possible and try to give them something to help them understand where they are, what they are doing, what role they are playing. It's about my fight today. I don't care about the past."
"Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is a movie layered with meaning that goes beyond Cole's work. It asks questions not just about the societies Cole documented but of how he was treated as an artist,... Read More