Rory.tv - GOES LIVE!

Here at Ogilvy in London, i sometimes have the pleasure of working with Rory Sutherland, who is Vice-Chairman across the group here in the UK. His thoughts, comments and speeches are regularly the highlight of many blogs around the advertising world and beyond, and his personal blog is the only real reason to log into our intranet. So it comes as a great pleasure to announce the launch of Rory.tv, put simply, its Rory, on screen, doing what he does best.

There are 4 episodes that you can select via his TV set, and with more to come i urge you to keep an eye on the site.

So far Rory has covered such hot topics as to why Mass Marketing is the nearest thing to an egalitarian state, and why putting security on your potato patch might not be such a bad idea.

Enjoy.

For more info on Rory click here.

Movie Boy - How interesting can this really get?

Firstly, yes, its been a while, i know by now i've had more come backs than Madonna, but i thought this was an appropriate article to blog about as its been done by my pals over at Glue London.

As part of The Suns 'Hollywoods Greats' movie give away, they have seen it fit to lock a poor boy up in a room, to watch movies, back to back.... You can message him, pick his next film and enter a daily competition to win £1000 if you guess the amount of hours watched in total over 7 days.

Most of the recent comments seem to involve, Jamie's rather unfortunate choice of vest, but generally , its built up quite a little following, though i do wonder, who will be watching this by the end of the week. Saying that, i've been logged in since this morning, so....

The free movies that are available won't set many film fans alight, but anything with LA Story and Bill & Ted, has got my vote.

Check out the link for yourself, here.

Fireflies Days Update 1

Hi everyone, well, i'm still here, alive and kicking. It's been two days and we've encountered some pretty big old mountains.

After arriving on Monday and managing to put our bikes together, we went for little leg-stretcher of 20km, to help prepare us for the next day, i'm glad to say that so far the bike has behaved itself, which is testament to my engineering skills.... either that or the talented Italian men that put it together in the first place.

Tuesday was our first day in the saddle and we were to cover 95km over the course of the day and climb two mountains. The first was 'Les Gets', which was kind enough and involved a climb of 1170M. It all seemed rather pleasant and it appeared the training had paid off.... However the second mountain 'Colombiere' proved a stiffer challenge, with a climb of 1613m over 14km. This was a toughy, but i'm glad to say i made it up to the summit, enabling me to drink in the amazing views and take a stack of photos of everyone who completed the climb, which was 42 of us.

I've loaded all the (decent) photos of Tuesdays summit onto my Flicker account here, there's more to come from Wednesday's 3 (yes, 3) mountains, including the awesome 'Cormet De Roseland', suffice to say, cycling up nearly 2000m over 23km to end up above the snow line is something i shall remember for ever.... I'll keep you posted.

NEil

PS: Yes, i've got the helmet cam, and yes i have some footage, but its proving tricky to edit, i haven't given up, so hopefully i will load something up soon. Watch this space.

Drag and drop video is here, nearly...

Animated John Lennon Interview

In 1969, a young boy snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room with his tape recorder and persuaded him to do an interview. Good old John, always prepared to talk about peace to anyone who'd listen.

Josh Raskin turned the interview into an animation and it was nominated for the best Short Film at the 2008 Oscars. Check out his website here. The animation was done by an artist called James Braithwaite who you can see more of him here.

Thanks to Fresh Creation for giving me a heads up.

DIY Adverts in Watchmen Movie

Zak Snyder (director of Dawn of the Dead & 300) has just finished shooting Watchmen, a movie based on one of the best comic books around (Time magazine has it in their top 100 books of all time). The movie is based in an alternate 1985, where super heroes are illegal and the world stands on the edge of nuclear war with Russia. One major company called 'Veidt' seems to be the dominant producer of almost everything from Trainers to Holidays and this is where it gets interesting....

Via YouTube, people can download various product demos and are invited to create a 15/30/60sec advert that if selected, will feature on the numerous televisions that pepper the Watchmen set. The top 20 have a chance of making it, with a few other prizes thrown in for good measure.

I love the idea of giving Watch-Fans a creative input into a movie that is regularly thought of as un-filmable and has a lot of fans very nervous. Plus, it's nice to see that the movie hasn't lost its integrity and tried to shoe horn in real life products, keeping its feet firmly routed in Alan Moores world.

I wonder how much input advertisers have when their clients product is being used in a movie, for example, did AMV have anything to do with the Guinness spot in Minority Report? Or was that driven by Spielberg?

Either way, UGC in a movie is a great idea and gets the thumbs up from me.

Animated Street Art

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

This is quite something to behold and i can't imagine how long it took. Blu, a street artist who seems to have painted walls all over the globe, has produced an animated film, set on the streets of Buenos Aires and southwest Germany. Its pretty freaky, some of his images are bonkers and a little disturbing, but they're strangely delicious at the same time.

Check out some of his static wall art at his website, i'm a big fan of the spikey giant in Verona.