Movie title stills: part 2 (in COLOUR!)

Okay, so I've gushed over film title screen shots from the earlier half of the 20th Century, now how do the later ones fair? Well, some of them are very good. There's no unifying style, instead the titles tend to either reflect the content of the film, or ignore the content all together in favour of more discreet use of typography.

And there's definitely a trend in more contemporary films towards very discreet titles. Although each of the following uses a distinct and no doubt carefully chosen typeface, from first glance they appear virtually identical.

So what does this say about modern audiences? Are we more astute in our understanding of typographic detail? Or do the film-makers simply want to let their films (and in some cases, the special effects) do the talking?

Toys

Dutch designers Stevijn van Olst and Johnny Slack' Cartelle studio site includes several online "toys" to amuse the web-weary designer. Among the delights on offer, you can burst balloons, bungee a skeleton doll, taunt sperm, and blow up fire-crackers, and programme beats using little blob creatures. Not involved or competitive enough to be described as games, the toys are more like a virtual version of those Newton's Balls executive toys.

Stevijn and Johnny's blog features thiis promo video for a Swarm Racer 3000, which I presume uses similar programming to achieve the "swarm intelligence" displayed by the sperm in their The Birds & The Bees game.

Movie Stills: part 1

This Movie Title Stills Collection, compiled by web-designer Christian Annyas is very special. Featuring over 800 title stills from movies dating from 1920 to the present day, the site presents the stills in handy chronological order.

Most of the earlier featured films (up to around the 1950s) include alternate screen shots from the films' trailers, and the screens that appeared to announce the end of the film. Some of these are obviously stock images used by the studios for a variety of films, but other, such as this first one, from King Kong, follow the design of the opening title.

Christian also runs a site called Art of the Title Sequence, which features appraisals of many sequences, plus interviews with their creators. Well worth a look, as it also contains quicktime videos of all the sequences, many of which are not available on YouTube.

VW archives

Volkswagen's advertising of the 1950s and 60s was ahead of its time in promoting affordability, practical solutions for large families, and low fuel consumption. Minimal, and characteristically deadpan, the ads still look fresh today.
Roy's VW Ad Archive compiles printed adverts, postcards, billboards, calendars, and even stamps, from 1952 up to the present day (or thereabouts), and features examples from the US, Europe, Canada, Brazil, and Australia. The site may look a bit unsophisticated, but the content is well organised and extensive. Nice one, Roy!

Now, I'm certainly no Beetle-geek, but there seems to be no shortage of VW-related online resources provided by people who are. VW Postcards and Found VW Postcards are, perhaps unsuprisingly, collections of postcards of the 1950s and 60s which feature the eponymous vehicles. Although some were obviously produced by VW for promotional reasons, many are simply scenes in which the photographer just happened to capture the image of VW in the landscape. This indicates the VW's popularity at that time, as well as the broader importance played by the automobile in leasure and hoiliday activities of the time - postcard of a carpark, anyone? I find the images fascinating not for the vehicles featured within them, but for the colour, tone, and architecture of the landscapes, which provoke such a distinctive nostalgia for post-war America.
Finally, for the kids, there's a Spot the VW game. Happy hunting.

Jazz Hamsters

Did you know hamsters could play jazz? Neither did I, until I came across a post on the Creative Review blog, about Infinity Productions' new campaign for mineral water manufacturer (can you manufacture mineral water?) Drench. Their strapline Perform At Your Best. Stay Drenched. taps the whole your-brain-is-75%-water-so-without-enough-water-you're-a-goggling-idiot argument, using it to suggest that well-hydrated hamsters will display unexpectedly high standards of improvisational musicianship. Obviously i don't care about any of that, but look at those hamsters go!

While common wisdom suggests that working with animals is generally a bad idea, I think this ad proves that if you can find a way to let animals just do what they do (like drag their bum across the carpet, or, er, hibernate), then you can save a packet on your budget.

Wall Drawing

The Turner Prize was won this week by Richard Wright, a painter who creates his images directly upon the walls of the gallery, providing them with a finite life span - that of the duration of the exhibition. The work that sealed the deal at Tate Britain was Wright's enormous abstract fresco no title, a kind of rococo riot in gold leaf.
This is the second time in recent years that a wall-painting has won a major UK art prize, after Toby Paterson was awarded the Becks Futures prize in 2002, for an at the ICA exhibition that featured a 69ft long wall painting inspired by his encounters with urban architecture as a skateboarder. And not yet a prize-winner, but no doubt with his fingers crossed for 3-in-a-row, will be Philippe Decrauzat, a Swiss multimedia artist, whose wall paintings feature in publisher Gestalten's recent book on contemporary abstract art and design, Neo Geo.

Sleevage

So I'm stuck at home recovering after having holes drilled in my sinuses earlier this week (don't worry, this was a medical procedure, that took place in a hospital), subsisting on a diet of cups of tea and DVDs.

Something else I've been amused and informed by is Sleevage, a cover-art blog maintained by members of Soap Creative, a Sydney and Los Angeles-based digital media firm. It contains insightful appraisals and stories on subjects such as the pulp men's magazine-origins of the cover of Frank Zappa's classic Weasels Ripped My Flesh, working drawings from Queens of the Stone Age's Era Vulgaris, the unused covers for Beck's Highway 65 Revisited tribute Modern Guilt, and the revelation that Metallica's debut Kill Em All, was originally to be entitled Metal Up Your Ass, with a cover featuring a knife protruding from a toilet bowl. I don't know about you, but I feel better for knowing this kind of stuff.

GDF project finished! (almost)

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah, now after being too busy for the last 2 weeks to do anything other than work on this goddamn project (yes, personal hygiene was one of the first things to go), I finally handed in my research PDF and campaign outcome on Monday. Along the way I discovered some interesting facts and theories about marketing to the over-50s, and spent hours measuring the adverts in newspapers - probably more interesting for me than anyone else, so I'll leave it there. Above are some pages from the research PDF. Now I'm going to do some xmas shopping.