Monthly Archive:: January 2015

Pioneers

Powerful short done for Italian-based construction and civil engineering company, Salini Impregilo.  What better way to draw in the greatest thinkers and minds to your company, than to produce a compelling call of action? I said it before and I’ll say it again, companies that utilize emotive storytelling in their marketing will ALWAYS go far.

| Months they were the odd one out
The introvert, the dreamer, the one who managed to see and do things beyond others understanding
Now it is their moment

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Notes on Blindness

What a remarkable piece by The New York Times! While somewhat lengthy, the story behind the visual really makes it one worth watching.

| In 1983, after years of deteriorating vision, the writer and theologian John Hull lost the last traces of light sensation. For the next three years, he kept a diary on audio-cassette of his interior world of blindness. This film is a dramatization that uses his original recordings.

Lately, I’ve been noticing that the NY Times have been doing a really solid job of bringing stories to life. It’s not just “news” as we know it, but they’re digging deeper and I really appreciate that as a viewer.  Here’s the story behind John Hull here.

| John description of blindness as “the borderland between dream and memory” informed our aesthetic approach, and much of the key imagery of the film is rooted in his testimony. Throughout the diaries John recounts vivid “technicolor” dreams, his “last state of visual consciousness,” which he compares to watching films. In particular, the water imagery that recurs in the film — visions of surging waves; of being dragged into the depths of the ocean — is derived from John’s account.

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Gotham 7.5K

Vincent Laforet is no stranger to quality images, but this, this is ridiculous.  With the opportunity to photograph NYC from an entirely aerial perspective, he took to the skies (at a higher altitude than normal) to take these incredible shots.  You see this complexity of the city that you really can’t see from ground level, crazy huh?

| But the real scary part was that there’s just simply nothing quite like leaning out of that chopper over the sea of darkness and light, held in only by a full body harness…There is no chance that you will fall – the harness is tried and true. But you DO think about the fall.

And you think about it again … And again … And how long you would have to think things over from that height all the way down to the ground below.

And then you start to think about the helicopter, and how it’s not exactly the most aerodynamically stable aircraft up there in the first place …. But I digress.

Check out his work here, along with some behind the scenes of the shoot here.

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An Astronauts Guide to Optimism

Chris Hadfield has to be one of my favorite people that exist at the moment.  Not only is he an astronaut, but he’s well-known for his ability to communicate powerfully and this video is no different.  If you like this post, check out another one that I posted last year by Chris here.

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Seven Things in Seven Years

When her site turned 7 years old, Maria Popova (founder and editor of Brain Pickings) found herself questioning how she would stay true to her focus, as the work she produced evolved.  In October of 2013, she put out a great essay on her reflections and all the lessons she’s learned in “7 Things I Learned in 7 years of Reading, Writing, and Living.” It’s an incredible and focused list of small verses that have massive meaning behind it.

About a year and change later, the good folks over at Dissolve created a video surrounding the essay.  Animation, orchestral music, and moving imagery really make this essay come to life – one of my favorites here on Silo Number Seven.

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How To Do What You Love

What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world.

[…]

Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.

[…]

Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you’ll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.

A great article by Paul Graham here.

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Perfection

This piece put together by director Martin Bennett is an awesome example of a commercial for a company that understands the necessity of emotion in marketing.  When I see a commercial that has the ability to stand on its own without any mention or hint of their product, then I believe it to be a great piece.  If Overfinch had never decided to place their product in the visuals, could you tell that it was a car commercial? It doesn’t hurt that they manage to nail the monologue as well!

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Year In Review

There’s not a lot that I really like about Facebook, but I really can’t deny the ideas around the videos they put out.  Every so often, they put out videos like the one above that reminds me that they are in fact human (in a small way).  I figured this was a good way to end the first week of the new year, have a good weekend folks!

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