Here’s a piece about the new Apple ad (the “pictures” commercial which my good buddy Rob Simonsen wrote the music for). I think this is the best commercial Apple has done in a while and I absolutely love Rob’s tune. Solo piano, real performance, no click track, performed while he was traveling in Germany.
Watch the commercial and read Zablotny’s thoughts below. (It’s especially interesting about the compression in the mix compared to other commercials.)
‘photos every day’
this is a spot by tbwa/chiat/day for apple, called ‘photos every day’. the craft is fantastic, and there’s some subtle, unusual attention to detail in it.
let’s take a look at the sound mix. here’s a waveform of the spot:
and now here’s the waveform of a conventionally mixed spot — this is that ‘old spice’ commercial everyone flipped out for a couple years ago. it might as well be any ad you see on tv today.
huge difference. there’s incredible restraint in the amount of compression applied to the music in ‘photos every day’. (from wikipedia, compression “reduces the volume of loud sounds or amplifies quiet sounds by narrowing or “compressing” an audio signal’s dynamic range”.) my point here is that if you caught this on tv, it would be substantially ‘quieter’ sounding than other ads around it.
the other interesting thing about the mix is that the iPhone shutter click sound is substantially undermixed. it comes across as incidental, and unobtrusive. the ambiences are the real star here, and the sound editor wasn’t even afraid to drop them out entirely for effect (see snowy skyscraper, 0:23).
other observations:
• there’s a real nice match-cut at 0:06 of the guy jumping off his skateboard into the shot of the jogger running.
• 0:25, the iPhone bobs up and down at a concert, and halfway through, the shot itself starts bobbing with the phone, keeping the screen stationary in the frame.
• overall, there’s a very careful variety of perspective, scale, and involvement. are we peering over someone’s shoulder? watching from across the street? ostensibly taking the picture, ourselves?
• i could have done without the voiceover at the end.
Julianne Moore as “Famous Works of Art” by Peter Linderbergh - for Harper’s Bazaar
Seated Woman With Bent Knee by Egon Schiele, La Grande Odalisque by Ingres, Saint Praxidis by Vermeer, The Cripple by John Currin, Les danseuses by Edgar Degas, Madame X by John Singer, Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer, Woman With a Fan by Modigliani, Man Crazy Nurse #3 by Richard Prince, Adele Bloch Bauer I by Gustav Klimt.
(Source: marthajefferson, via sarahalyse)
The Importance of Starting
Working out ideas for a handful of talks coming up in the next month.
I’ll be speaking on music technology at Cal Poly this Thursday before heading across the Atlantic to do an afternoon session for the ArtEZ conference in the Netherlands. Then Rian and I are going to hop over and do a joint masterclass at the National Film and TV School in London. Who knows what kind of shenanigans we’ll get up to? Not I, is all I’m saying. I definitely don’t know.
I’m gonna be in Europe for a while before coming back to speak at Hallmark (?! - yes, that Hallmark), so hit me up east-siders (that’s what we call Europe, right?) if you wanna chat or if you have an idea for another class I should come talk to.
Check out the “Handmade Digital” talk that we did at last week’s Adobe conference!
The Made Shop: Handmade Digital
Adobe just posted the video of The Made Shop’s recent talk that I did with Nathan and Kim and Adam. There’s no live camera so you can’t see our pretty faces, but the full presentation is there, complete with questions and answers.
If you’ve got an hour or so to kill and want to see a bit behind the scenes into our design process, check it out.
(Source: vimeo.com)
Speaking at the Adobe MAX conference this week with The made Shop. Come say hi if you’re here:)
My new assistant reporting for duty.
Steven Spielberg’s follow-up to LINCOLN… “OBAMA”
Kid Blue and Kid Lu crossing the street together, downtown LA
We gotta start teaching our daughters to be somebodies instead of somebody’s.
(via birdiedesigns)
A direct quote from The Times newspaper, talking about a Peter Ustinov documentary and saying that:
“highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector”.
(via sarahalyse)
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