Hasta La Creative!

Advertising Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, USA
Co-Chairman / Creative Director: Rich Silverstein
Creative Directors: Rick Condos, Hunter Hindeman
Art Director: Andre Massis
Copywriter: Jordan Kramer
Executive Producer: Cindy Fluitt
Producer: Todd Porter
Production Company: Psyop, Los Angeles
Directors: Todd Mueller, Kylie Matulick, Psyop
Executive Producers: Angela Bowen, Neysa Horsburgh
Producers: Sara Mills, Blythe Dalton, Luisa Murray
Associate Producer: Tarun Charaipotra
Lead Flame Artists: Jamie Scott, Aska Otake
Flame Artists: Tim Farrell, Peter Amante, Joe Wenkoff
Technical Directors: Jeffrey Dates, Dave Barosin, Ted Kotsadtis, Todd Akita
Animation: Jason Vega, Gerald Ding, Jeff Lopez, Kittly Lin, Andy Hara
R&D: Andreas Gebhardt
Lighting: Andy Hara
Tracking: Joerg Liebold, Jeen Lee, Chris Hill, Steven Hill
Roto: Leslie Chung, David Marte, Alejandro Monzon
Design: Zoe Wishart, Lutz Vogel, Jon Saunders, Chris Saunders Jake Sargent, Ron Kurwin
Storyboards: Josh Wiesenfeld
Editors: Cass Vanini, Brett Goldberg, Brett Nicholetti
Director of Photography: Crille Forsbaerg
Line Producer: Michael Schlenker
Final Music: Sejong Soloists
Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Summer
Sound Design Company: 740 Sound Design
Sound Designer: Eddie Kim
Executive Producer: Scott Ganary
Aired: June 2008

Bright: Architectural Illumination and Light Installations, edited by Clare Lowther and Sarah Schultz (amazon UK and USA).

Publisher Gestalten says: Light is a magical medium for creative experimentation that architects and designers are currently using to produce a broad spectrum of exciting work. Bright presents a rich selection of these innovative projects that are setting current trends in the creative use of light. Featuring both stunning photography and detailed text information, the book is not only an up-to-date reference tool for professionals working in the fields of lighting design, architecture and art, but also sheds new light on the future of architecture and design.

View of the inside of the book (realities:united). Image courtesy Gestalten

In his brief introduction text, lighting designer guru Rogier van der Heide from Arup discusses the subtle art of lighting, its ability to balance both task-oriented and experience-oriented strategies, its potential to enhance a brand and the necessity to support its design by a dialog with the client, the environment and concerns about sustainability.

After that it’s an easy cruise, the topic is broken up in 3 sections: static, dynamic and interactive. You navigate from household names to lesser-known design studios. Six to eight pages are dedicated to each studios. The first page lists their contact details, identity, key project and profile. The second one is filled with swanky images of their most spectacular or relevant works. Next, one of their project is selected, illustrated and described in details (how the project started, its objectives, the solutions found to solve the technological challenges, etc.) Easy as pie and compelling. It’s both a book you’ll abandon on your living room table to convince your guests that you have the taste of a trendy and educated man and a volume you’ll actually want to read. I only wish i could have found in the book some information about its editors.

View of the inside of the book (Coney Island Parachute Jump illuminated by by Leni Schwendinger. Image courtesy Gestalten

Bright catalogs the state of the art of illumination and its use in architecture, and interactive installations. Most of the projects selected are sublime (most of them only, i still haven’t recovered from the sight of the Berliner Dom during Berlin’s Festival of Lights.) Some projects are so astonishing that you forget the building underneath the light show, others act more as subtle enhancement of a building or environment.

A few examples:

Built in the ’30s as part of one of Europe’s largest coal-mining complexes, the Zollverein Kohlenwäsche building’s intended lifespan was of 20 years – the amount of time it was expected to take to exhaust the vein of coal. Instead, after renovation by OMA, and after being granted UNESCO World Heritage protection, the site situated in Essen, Germany, has been opened to the public as an exhibition space. Licht Kunst Licht, in charge of the lighting design, integrated ‘light arteries’ and a group of theatre projectors into the building but its most breathtaking contribution illuminates the main steel gangway that gives access to the Coal Washer.

Image via designlines

Photo Thomas Mayer, Essen

Using technology previously employed in Seattle Public Library, the treads and sidepanels were coloured orange. At night, the result evokes a stream of molten steel. The interior staircase is in fact made of unpainted steel; its bright orange colour is an illusion created by the tinted strip lights set into the side-panels.

Magic Monkey had professional mountain climbers drill holes into the Electrabel power station in Drogenbos, near Brussels to cover is 18.000 m2 surface with a constellation of thousands of individually controllable LED pixels. Drivers passing by the station can see it from a distance morning and evening.

Unlike many of the projects presented in the book, Weather Patterns is a delicate, light installation created to allow the York Art Gallery building to communicate the changing weather cycles surrounding the Gallery in the hours of darkness.

Loop.ph installed five window units which emit light at night and allow sunlight to reflect during daytime. Electroluminescence (EL) panels are sandwiched between toughened glass and a mirror. A computer reads data from a dedicated weather station on site and uses this information to animate the printer EL pattern (movie and animations).

Related stories: Colour by Numbers, Interview of UnitedVisualArtists, Video of Volume, The World’s Largest Timepiece, EnterActive, Light Art from Artificial Light, Tim Edler: Realities United, From Spark to Pixel – Part 1 and Part 2, digital lamp shades.

LONDON – The UK advertising industry blog Scamp has been unblocked by Google, after being shut down yesterday (Tuesday) for breaching the conditions of Google blogging platform, Blogger.

LONDON – Vue Entertainment and Audible.co.uk, the provider of audio books, have teamed up to promote the National Year of Reading.

BEIJING – A British ITN journalist has been dragged along the ground and forcibly detained by Chinese police because he reported on a pro-Tibet demonstration outside Beijing’s Olympic stadium.

The article about Adland in Dagens Industri (a.k.a Sweden’s pink paper) today focuses on the “Chinagate” affair. “Death threats from angry readers commonplace for Ad-blogger” reads the headline.

For those of you who missed it, the posts about the Swedish Red Cross Youth human rights campaign drew a lot of attention. One adgrunt, whole9yards, spotted that some photographs in the campaign depict police in Nepal rather than China – see Red Cross (Youth) pulls “Olympic” human rights campaign in Sweden. – and voiced his concerns about this. Other commentators attracted to the posts weren’t anywhere near as decent and well articulated as he was, and soon the comments became a regular flame-fest. What you see on here the site is not everything that was posted, since most of the comments were flagged as spam by the automatic spamtrap, but it will give you a general idea of what was being said. Emails directed to me personally were a hundred times worse, and it culminated in late night phone calls and even death threats if I did not remove the campaign and apologize for it’s existence. Not to mention the DOS-attacks, spambombings and google-bombings attempting to link Adland with the word prostitute. The Swedish Youth Red cross have had to endure the same, and several facebook groups were started rallying people to join in the hate for them.

For the record, I never remove campaigns submitted unless the creators of said campaign asks me to.

Links on anti-cnn regarding that campaign can be seen here: [????] ?????????????????[?????!] and Unbelievable: The Red Cross——Hypocritical and misleading !.

Resume.se also had an article a few weeks ago about the threats I’ve received for publishing that campaign (and the note that the campaign was pulled). See :Adlands grundare hotas för OS-kritisk reklam. The anti-cnn sajt is created by students to expose what they call “Western Goebbels’ Nazi media” – that is, Western media’s biased coverage of unrest in Tibet. See news.com Australia: Chinese students launch ‘Anti-CNN’ website

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LONDON – Ben Ling, one of Facebook’s top executives who helped build the social network’s application platform, is leaving the company .

LONDON – In a move to dramatically cut the number of plastic bags handed out at Tesco stores across the country, the supermarket firm will now require customers to ask for carrier bags while shopping.

LONDON – As some Olympic sponsors complain people are being kept away from their pavilions in Beijing, Visa has capitalised on the record-breaking gold medal haul of US swimmer Michael Phelps.

LONDON – Clothing chain Gap is understood to have shifted its integrated marketing account out of Craik Jones Watson Mitchell Voelkel into Kitcatt Nohr Alexander Shaw without a pitch.