Light fantastic

Let there be light. Some interesting things are going on with light nowadays. One technique uses flashlights and a long exposure to paint images, and it's currently being used by a few folks right now. There's an engaging, new commercial for Sprint on the air. There's the work by the Japanese performance group Pika Pika. And light illustrates the lyrics in a video by The Willowz.

Here's a behind-the-scenes look at the Sprint commercial, which was directed by Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris (of Little Miss Sunshine) and shot in L.A.'s MacArthur Park. Post house Brickyard explains what was tweaked, "The spot, shot entirely in-camera, was created from a series of still images linked together to achieve a live action effect...some compositing to bring the various layers of imagery together."

Below are several projects that Pika Pika put together in 2006 and the first couple months of 2007.

The Willowz video for "Jubilee," directed by Toben Seymour and released January 2007.

And of course, Picasso painted with light nearly 60 years ago. More images from a light graffitista in Germany here.

Meanwhile, Graffiti Research Lab brings together taggers, hackers, geeks and gawkers with open-source code and tips for light-projected graffiti on office buildings and bridges. Get the how-to here. Or just watch below.


In France, two VJs (known collectively as Uruk Videomachine) project images onto buildings and bring the architecture to life. Below is a clip from a performance they put together in Dijon. (It gets really good at 3:32 in.)

And back in Paris, Diesel used holograms in the runway show for its Spring/Summer 2008 line.

Who's driving a hybrid?

A recent study conducted by Autobytel reports on who's buying hybrid cars. The statistics are surprising. The buyers aren't just young Blue State drivers on the two coasts. (And they're not all like Ed Begley, Jr. and Laurie David, either.)

40% are Republicans.
36% are Democrats.
12% are Independents, and another 12% consider themselves unaffiliated.

31% are in the Northeast.
16% call the West Coast home.
21% live in the Midwest.
20% are from the Southeast, while 12% are from the Southwest.

57% are over age 45.
16% are 65 or older.

48.5% don’t have a college degree.
24.5% have a college degree.
27% have a graduate degree.

52% have a household income of $60,000.
35% make less than $40,000 a year.

(Courtesy of the What's Offline column in The New York Times, which cites a Reader's Digest article that quotes from the Autobytel study linked above.) In related news, Toyota announced it's testing a hybrid that can be re-charged in a regular outlet and will run for much longer than previous plug-in engines. Meanwhile, Porsche is developing a hybrid version of its Cayenne SUV.

An era of Serra

How do you move the 550 tons of steel that's part of the Richard Serra retrospective at the MoMA up and into the second story of a mid-town building? Randy Kennedy of The New York Times details the choreography to do just that in this article.

"Plate by curved plate, workers from Mr. [Joe] Vilardi’s Long Island company, Budco Enterprises, hoisted each piece from an empty lot on the museum’s west side to a makeshift two-story-high platform, slowly lowering it onto three humble hunks of metal with rollers, called skates. A forklift then nudged the plate, roller-skating it into the building to its next appointment, with the gantry. Dangling from the gantry’s cross beam were cables with two crablike steel claws that grabbed the plate and hoisted it into the air. The gantry then glided down the room with the plate, which appeared strangely weightless, like a velvety orange sail being wafted by a breeze."

As Michael Kimmelman exlains in his review, "That second floor at the Modern, by the way, is the show’s tour de force. A high, huge and like so much of this museum, totally unlovable space, it was conceived for housing Mr. Serra’s sculptures." Certainly Serra's pieces just can't be parked anywhere. Frank Gehry specifically designed a space large enough to hold Serra's sculptures in the Guggenheim in Bilbao. It took an old Nabisco factory -- now the Dia Beacon -- hold more of Serra's torqued ellipses. And the Gagosian Gallery, which played host to more spiral, toruses and spheres in 2001, has to be one of the largest gallery spaces in Manhattan.

A slightly less complicated installation in the garden of the MoMA is below.


The retrospective is, of course, incredible (despite what this guy at the Washington Post says.) The newest pieces continue to engage the visitors. Some people walk the perimeter as if they were in a labyrinth while others go straight to the center of the ellipses. Two works in particular, Band and Sequence, add serpentine elements and surprise to the bending of balance and perspective that Serra does so well.

Kwik-E-Marketing

You've probably seen advertising for it on TV and online, but not in a commercial. To promote the Simpsons movie, 20th Century Fox has been partnering with companies like 7-Eleven and JetBlue. Mr. Burns hijacked the blog of JetBlue's David Neeleman for a few days this month. Twelve 7-11 stores have been converted to Kwik-E-Marts through the end of July. And in a clever reverse product placement, the stores sell Springfield-worthy products such as Buzz Cola, Krusty-O's cereal and Radioactive Man comics that are "flying off the shelves." One lucky fan ran into an incognito Matt Groening while visiting the Burbank store and got an autographed box of Krusty O's.

A ubiquitous, unnamed "source close to the movie's promotions" told Brandweek, "It wasn't really about lining up as many partners as possible, it was about having the right partners in the right context and the right message." It appears that the efforts for 7-Eleven were spearheaded by agency Tracy Locke with some serious input from Groening and his team at Gracie Films.

In addition, the movie studio paired with USA Today for a contest to see which Springfield would play host to the movie's premiere. (Springfield, Vermont gets the honors.) Fox also got on the YouTube bandwagon with this 9-second video.


And now Haaper's Bazaar has even gotten into the game. The August issue has the Simpson family and a cartoon version of Linda Evangelista in Paris wearing the latest from Versace, Chanel, Marc Jacobs and more. Get your cartoon couture here. The current issue of Vanity Fair asks Conan O'Brien what it was like to work on The Simpsons. More writers, the voices, other funny people and even Murdoch provide VF with the inside skinny and color commentary here.

Of course, you can create your own Simpsons avatar here. There will probably be a few more surprises before the movie opens on July 27. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Burger King has launched SimpsonizeMe.com while Leo Burnett says, "Hey, we pitched that to you!" in this NPR report (courtesy of Agency Spy).

Next big things?

At the 54th annual Advertising Festival in Cannes, Leo Burnett and Contagious magazine ran a seminar called Wildfire 2007. Ninety-five percent of the seminar was highlighting a lot of things that have already received a lot of attention. (Club Penguin. JetBlue's story booth. The spoiled brat $9.99 gimmick for Domino's Pizza.) However, in the last few minutes of their presentation, they listed a few things worth watching in the coming year. Life Cake is purporting itself to be a combination of YouTube, Wiki and Facebook that will launch soon. Stikfas is -- surprise -- a stick-figure toy. Blyk is an ad-supported free mobile service in Europe. Photosynth is from Microsoft. If you're looking for photos of an object or place, it will search multiple sources online. Then it collects those images and creates a 3-D model. Will these be the next big things? Check back in a year.

Dramatic chipmunk & friends

Five perfect seconds. Does anyone know what the soundtrack is? Here's a link for the original clip. (The chipmunk was an animal segment on a Japanese TV show.) Now there's even a t-shirt and a Facebook application.


French D.J. combo Justice serves up some great CGI on t-shirts in this video to their catchy single. It seems even the Old Grey Lady has a bit of crush on them in this profile. (The NYT has moved the article behind a paid firewall. Click here for the same article republished in a Scottish newspaper.)


Some clever performance art with the iPhone. There's a company behind it that sells software for "electronic" magicians.