Little Teaser

I've found this blog has drifted away from Design topics somewhat and begun to mutate into a compendium of libertarian sympathy. Although I do have a mild passion for the fight against government tyranny, my primary passion is Design and artwork for film and that is the course where I would like to steer this ship back towards. 

So I thought to turn over this new leaf, I'd have a look the recent teaser poster for Pixar's new film Brave. 

Generally I love teaser artwork, its typically the most engaging and creative collateral made for a film; the artwork is required to arrest the audience with some intrigue or a strong visual concept based on a wider abstraction of the film. Its almost always more interesting than the head-collage of top-billed cast that usually follows in the subsequent theatrical campaign.

At first glance, I would not have picked this artwork to be for a Pixar film, it is distinctly more atmospheric and mature than any previous Pixar key art perhaps with the exception of Wall-E, which I think is a good sign for this film. I love the lighting used in this artwork; using mist to enhance the sense of distance and amply the glow of the low-lying light source (sun). The bold silhouette of the title treatment and the sole redhead figure gives a distinct tenor of adventure and scale. Furthermore, the artwork constructs a sensation of space and direction, fashioned from the trajectory of the stream running from the character's vantage point and positioning us in the artwork at the base of the poster. The floating magical blue lights trailing behind the character signifies a direction to her movement, a journey. This impression is further underlined by the hazy forms behind the title treatment, lending to a sense of the unknown lying beyond. 

The darker ambience to the artwork along with the style of the title treatment gives the artwork a distinct Burtonesque (referring to Tim Burton) feel, not unlike the key art for Big Fish. The fiery red curls too particularly evoke impressions of Burton's take on the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland.

What this teaser artwork is telling me about the film Brave both excites and concerns me; Pixar seem to be attempting a few fundamentally new things with this movie. This will be the first Pixar film with a female lead character, which of itself is novel and will open up the potential for a new field of character exploration which has yet to be fully realised in a Pixar film. It does however have the potential to in essence change the particular dynamic that has made Pixar's movies so universally appreciated; that is - in reference to Movie Bob's Up review - "...the most primal of mannish heartaches, the father/son dynamic". The setting also appears to be more fantastical than previous films which have always kept some semblance of modernity to them.

These implications of setting and character - bolstered by a key art with a distinct quality of ambience and fatefulness - are pointing towards Pixar's artistic intentions of carrying a more mature tone with this film. Though with Pixar's track record, I have no doubt there will be plenty of fun to be had on the way.

Free Choice Matters

For a change, I want to post about topics other than government strangle-holds on certain freedoms which I can loosely attribute to Graphic Design. Thusly, I must exorcise the last reserve of my libertarian rejoinder toward the despairing news that featured in the first WTF Edition of Weekly Inspiration... 

The figuratively-free exchange of media has defined the age we live in and fostered with it a cultural undercurrent of libero-democratic ideals, which frequently run against notions of authority and censorship. We have come to expect the online environment to remain an open-source of both consumption and contribution, one that has no need for an omniscient overseeing entity to ensure all runs smoothly.

Reflect on the current state of the Internet and just how it came to be; with media streaming, news services, Facebook, forums, gaming, dating, pornography, education, religion, science, literature, editorials, comedy and competitions - to rattle off a few examples. The Internet is a digital garden bed of culture that has blossomed without the guiding hand of any one overseer; it is an attestation of the robustness of our culture which has duplicated and flourished in a new digital domain. We have witnessed in a manner of decades a microcosm of the natural, self-structured way in which culture, civilisation and democracy emerges, and all by the virtue of a free exchange of media. For a government now, at this late stage of the Internet's manifestation, to attempt to 'filter' what we have free access to consume is antithetical to the values that are the bedrock of modern-online culture.

To the Australian government I say, by all means, stop and persecute people who break our laws and harm our children both on and offline. Those people, like the rest of us, have exercised their freedom and in choosing to break the law, have invited the repercussions to fall upon themselves. But for the rest of us, who have not broken any law, nor have any intent to ever do so, we do not deserve to have that which we value most diluted without our consent.

Weekly Inspiration #5 (WTF Edition)

http://www.news.com.au/technology/internet-filter/telstra-optus-to-begin-censoring-web-next-month/story-fn5j66db-1226079954138


The eminent Christopher Hitchens has said that he likes to begin his days with a distinct sense of 'annoy'; I'm paraphrasing here but it is an emotion that acts as his motivator to write and to challenge the stupidity that goes on in the world.


This post of "Weekly Inspiration" is unique in the sense that I have done this segment with the intent of it being largely positive and a means to direct people towards links that instilled in me a positive inspiration. Well I am now breaking the mould as I, agreement with Hitchens, have felt that negative inspiration is just as constructive.


If this linked story turns out to be true, those of us who are concerned about individual freedom and the government's innate desire to subdue it will all collectively feel the distinct sense of annoy. This is a sense beyond shock, as we've known of government intentions to 'filter' the net for some time; this is more a sense of dread, disgust and dismay. The issue of censorship had faded away as more immediate (deliberate perhaps?) government-instigated disasters began to flood the news-space, but it now seems to be cropping up once again.


What I'm unsure about with this development is that it seems to be a voluntary initiative by Telstra and Optus, both whom I was under the impression that they had been attempting to make the push to censorship difficult for the government. But now if it turns out they are now pioneering a policy of censorship, I can imagine some mass-emigration to begin occurring with those ISPs. I wonder too what will the state of Australia's 'filtering' be when the entire country is supplied Internet services entirely from a monopoly company umbillically linked to the government.


I write this as I am forced to resubmit an advertisement for a bunch of movies to be released in August. The reason is that one of the titles briefed to me was rated R18+ and as you can imagine in the milquetoast society that Australia has become, certain publications cannot advertise movies rated as such. I suspect that the nature of film distribution in South Australia has something to do with it but in any case, I stand by the same principle... No government imposed rule should be able to prevent a population that is statistically made up a group of law-abiding, self-determinant, intellectually-competent adults from consuming media that does not directly, in its production, cause explicit and deliberate harm to anyone.

Weekly Inspiration #4

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/3587-Game-Reviews

Its been a while since this supposedly weekly segment has been posted, so I'll try and fire out a couple in rapid succession in the coming days. Life outside this blog, which is most of it, has become a bit hectic of late and my 2-part post, faking a government plan to treat DVDs like tobacco, took more time to wrap up than I would have liked, and frankly I don't think it really hit all the right points in the end. But I digress...

I was quiet stimulated by Extra Credits discussion on game reviewing and even inspired me to consider (maybe) cranking out a review or two and see how they fit...

"The most important critique of modern reviews is that there's no critique, only review."

The Packaged War - Part 2: Someone Think of the Children

With its plans to undermine the tobacco companies' leverage of branded packaging well underway, the government has been greatly encouraged to pursue new avenues; where the superior intellectual and moral mettle of parliament can serve to remove further temptations from the landscape of excess, pervasive in a free society. Where many have expected the next target to be alcohol or fast food, the government has instead chosen DVDs, video games and other products of home entertainment to be the next commercial product to which it will legislate mandatory plain packaging.


DVDs have exploded in popularity over the last decade and begun to normalise the behaviour of watching films in the home. Removing film-watching from the context of a social activity has degenerated the wholesomeness of cinema-going and condensed its audiences into reclusive enclaves whom are more likely to remain sedentary at home rather than engage with the outside world for their entertainment. From this, the government has deemed it necessary to educate the public of the implied social, cultural and health effects of excessive consumption of home video. 

The key to ensuring the success of such regulation, is to comprehensively convince the population of a product's ill-effects on the vulnerable; children are the quintessential proxies for projecting all worst-case scenarios. By incorporating such negatives into the conventional wisdom of the populace, a government can convince people that in limiting the choices of adults, they are protecting the wellbeing of children. From there its a mere extension of reasoning that products that are bad for children are also bad for adults, and should thusly be extracted from the palette of acceptable choices. With ingenius foresight, governments the world over have spent decades acclimatising us to assess the suitability of films by arbitrary ages with rather flimsy justifications. It is from this entrenched system that the government will finally be able to pull the reins on the insidious marketing arms of the home entertainment industry.

The Packaged War - Part 1 On to the Next Step...

With largely bipartisan support from both sides of the parliament and surveys concluding an overwhelming public support, the government's plain packaging policy is well on its way to pioneering a new front in the war against tobacco, and beyond. 

Too long have we allowed people to be willing victims of insidious branding and Orwellian marketing which take the malleable minds of the weak-willed and dilute them into mindless consumption machines, ordained to make the wrong lifestyle choices. 

To our fortune however, the White Knight of the people, the government, has taken up the mantle against the amoral corporations that pull the strings, so that - without irony - they can reclaim our free will for us. We have the luxury to be nonchalant as we, the marionettes, dangle and convulse sporadically beneath them in their tussle, losing nothing more than a few trifling shards of our freedoms. We can rest assured that the government is, after all, acting in our best interests.

What critics might call an untested and conjectural policy, is attributed by a far greater number as a pioneering world-first strategy that strikes at the heart of the ills of our social and physical health. The broad community has demonstrated in its support for this measure that the principal of personal choice cannot trump the greater social good, which is burdened by the selfish choices of individuals; choices motivated evidentially by packaging. Spurred on, the government now looks to the next agressor towards the serfs in its charge; a shadowy looming menace that has, for years, circled the fringes of our culture; a purveyor of the most insidious branding and garish packaging that must be reigned in, to protect the credulous amongst us. The government is now to move against the film industry...


In part 2, I will exclusively reveal the top-secret details of the government's bold plan to protect the Australian people from the proven health and societal dangers of the products of the film industry.