BBC4 All America is a showcase of BBC archive programmes exploring society in the US. As part of the collection they've uploaded the series 'Inside America' profiling 13 American citizens & their professions. One of which is a cracking half hour programme looking at New York Ad executive Steve Frankfurt working at Y&R around 1965. It's a fascinating look into the life of a real Mad Man, who could've been Don Draper.
I'm not normally a fan of Barnardo's advertising. Their previous work has tended to be unremittingly bleak and always seemed more concerned with generating column inches and troubling awards juries.
This new spot, however, is excellent and made me think differently about Barnardo's and the role they play in helping vulnerable children. It completely stood out like a sore thumb in the break that I was watching and stopped me in my tracks.
They have managed to sensitively incorporate a positive message of hope and transformation into this commercial without losing an edge or making it sentimental or unbelievable. It's brilliantly cast, very well acted and directed, tightly edited and the end result is that you come out thinking that Barnardo's really does make a difference and helps children to turn their lives around. This sort of creative approach could have been a disaster in the wrong hands but cloth caps doffed to everyone involved for pulling out all the stops with the execution. Hope it really does the business for them.
A selection of motor racing shots taken by Atelier Olschinsky for Nevertheless Magazine of the 1000KM Red Bull Ring race circuit. The lighting on them gives them a lovely feel, takes us back to another age of motor racing. There's a few more over on there behance folio as well.
Wind whistles though long grass. A lonely tumbleweed skitters across the road. Or something like that. Yep it's been awfully quiet on the Sell! Sell! Blog for the last few days, hasn't it? Well, as one of our clients observed a couple of weeks ago, Sell! Sell! is like the proverbial swan; on the surface - serene, underneath, all hell is breaking loose. Or in our case, we've been deep in the business end of production and development of some interesting projects. We hope to share them with you sometime soon.
At the weekend I popped along to the fantastic De La Warr Pavillion at Bexhill on Sea to have a look at the Warhol exhibition they're holding. They've pulled together an impressive collection of his work, from his early drawings and prints, through to some of his most iconic and best-known pieces. A full set of Chairman Maos across one wall was great, as was the room full of his posters and commercial work. Being an ad-bastard, the giant print of his Absolut ad artwork was good to see in there. Upstairs is a whole gallery papered in his cow print, with huge prints of his camouflage and the dollar sign (below) (it's hard to tell from the grainy camera phone photo, but that print is six feet tall). All in all, well worth the visit, and in a beautiful building too.
