Art & Copy: Apple's Commercial

Art & Copy is a film documentary created in 2009 by Doug Pray that reveals the thoughts and inspirations of advertising creatives that invented many of the well known ads that we all still remember, despite viewing them years ago. There were many interesting tidbits in the film that analyzed advertising experts, ads such as "Just do it","Got Milk", and "Where's the beef?", but what I found particularly interesting was the segment that talked about Apple's first television advertisement.

All Hail Apple.

Now, I'm not a big fan of Apple products. I have never owned an iPad, iPhone, iPod, Mac, etc. I intend to keep it this way unless prompted by a greater force than my morals to use one. However, I do respect Apple's advertising campaigns, especially the ones with the colored backgrounds, black silhouettes, and white earbuds. It was surprising to learn that Apples first commercial, which was aired during the 1984 Super Bowl, was not informative, but rather pleasantly absurd.

I loved learning through Lee Clow, the man who co-created the ad, that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs both paid for it out of pocket. Honestly, the ad worked pretty well on me. I feel like if I had watch this ad during the 1984 Super Bowl I would have been immediately interested, and would have begun researching what the hell a "Mac" was. It's also pretty cool that the commercial also sparked a renaissance-like change when it came to filming and editing future commercials for several companies. I had never seen the ad before watching this documentary, but I have seen something similar in the past when the video game company Valve ported their popular game Half Life 2 to the Mac OS.

So yeah, it was pretty neat to put two and two together nearly six years later. As I stated before, I don't like Apple products, but the advertising division of the company definitely knew how to put their product out there. I'm a little curious as to what kinds of ads will be memorable in the near future, especially with so many of them being constantly thrown at us day in and day out.

A Continuation of My Capstone Project

It's been a tough couple of weeks with college and working this semester, but I have taken some time to begin practice on animating in Source Filmmaker. I've been learning about the different models, particle effects, lighting, and time manipulation during free time between my busy schedule. For an assignment last year in Dr. William's animation class, I opted to use Source Filmmaker to create my animation, and this was the end result after a few hours of experimenting.

It was short, it was simple, and I used a few techniques in posing and lighting that I was happy to figure out and implement. However, for my capstone project, I wish to create something 10x greater than that assignment I roughly put together. I've already got a rough story idea in my head that involves elements inspired by films such as 10 Cloverfield Lane and Ex Machina. I don't want to spoil too much, but I have a feeling this will be fun to animated, especially when it comes to character facial expressions. I'm still reading through the books recommended to me by my advisor in my last post, so the story could still drastically change.  I've began study on pose-to-pose animation in Source, and I've been following tutorial videos like the one linked below to better understand the technique for my end product.

Alongside animation practice, I've been reading scholarly articles on the overall subject of 3D animation. Pat Power's Animated Expressions: Expressive Style in 3D Computer Graphic Narrative Animation contains a lot of interesting viewpoints about the visual styles and semiotics of animated shorts. It also goes in-depth on subjects such as projects with a mix of live-action and CGI, which was an interesting read, but I mostly stuck to the research on animated shorts. I hope that my animation manages to bring emotions out of my audience, rather than thoughts like "this looks pretty meh" or "I think I saw a glitch in the background". The story and characters are my main focus in this short, and I'm going to polish the overall animation so that the audience only pays attention to said story and characters. This is going to be a project I will be putting quite a bit of effort in within the next couple months.