Adidas - Unite All Originals

Adidas' new advert was created by SoMe, an artist I've been a huge fan of for years. His effortless animation style really struck my imagination before I knew what it really was. I remember coming home from school and seeing Kanye West's Good Life video on the music channels and just being inspired. I was mad into digital art at that age. Looking back on here I've realised I've previously wrote about SoMe, nice to know I'm consistent over the years, eh!? And also that I did teach myself to rotoscope after mentioning here that I wanted to learn, can I get a woohoo for self improvement?!
After researching the advert I discovered via digitalartsonline that there's an interactive element which can be found on Adidas' website here. The video can be controlled by human interaction, following a tutorial, you're invited to either say or type what you see, making the video react to your input. A brilliant idea from Adidas, the novelty value alone is a winner, but teamed with Run DMC, SoMe and A-Trak, anyone with an interest in sports or urban culture is going to be sucked in like fat kid in a water slide. Absolutely raging I don't have my Stan Smiths anymore - as in, I have no recollection of throwing them away, so they must be somewhere... but where!?
I'm a lover and a hater of how fashion recycles - it's always when I give up hope and get rid, that bygone era makes a come back. If Bench ever becomes fashionable again it will be a day of silence in my house. I had enough of the stuff to dress a small army and got rid of it in a de-chav wardrobe revamp a few years ago, so naturally it's bound to be the new 'it' streetwear brand any day now...

Ideas for settings

I've been thinking about where I want to set my lightbox and how it's going to interact with the surroundings, I rediscovered these idents used to promote The Warehouse Project, a seasonal night club in Manchester, for it's 2010 season.

This made me think of the stairs of Newton which are lit up at night, which could be a prime location to set up.

GIF Player

An animated gif is a digital file format where multiple images are being looped after each other, creating a short and small sized movie clip. The file type was first introduced in 1987 as a first online movie, but soon lost its function with the increasing speed of internet and the possibility to upload longer and bigger movies. The document type however has gained back some of its popularity and is even entering the field of Art today. In 1832, Jozeph Plateau, a Belgian physicist invented the phenakistiscope. The first device which was able to show a moving image and which is considered to be the pre-runner of modern cinema. The only down part however was the fact that it could only show short movie clips in a loop. An animated gif is exactly that, and after some research on Plateau’s original design, Pieterjan Grandry succeeded to build a device capable of playing animated gifs, incorporating led lights, microchips and magnetic sensors. The Gif player is a wooden box, much like a turntable, with a dimmer to adjust the speed of the animation and a small looking hole in the front.

text via.

I found this really interesting that people were still revisiting the now more or less defunct GIF, which seems to only have a life span on blogging sites such as tumblr. It's inspirational to see such simple things being given a new creative twist. I could imagine this kind of technique used on a much larger scale for cheap and effective advertising, for example on billboards, parts of the image could move, or even the moving photographs which became popular on the internet in which really slight things move, like a skirt blowing in the wind. I could see myself looking twice if I thought I saw a static billboard move out of the corner of my eye.