The Better Mousetrap

Back Through the Looking Glass: The Lessons of Gravity

 

 

“Lowry … stood across the road from his subjects and observed. Often enough there are a number of individuals in a crowd peering back at him. They invite us momentarily into their world, like characters on a stage sometimes do, breaking the fourth-wall illusion.”

‘Sir Ian McKellen: My lifelong passion for LS Lowry’ (The Telegraph, 21 April 2011)

 

Breaking the fourth wall is always a bold decision. To explicitly acknowledge the audience is to deliberately break the illusion, an act as liable to pull an audience out of the moment as draw them conspiratorially in.

It worked for Alfie, it worked for Ferris Bueller, and considering Sir Ian McKellen’s remarks, it worked rather well for Northern artist LS Lowry.

Of course, art and movies and story-telling at their best have always used their magic to invite audiences into their world.

When Alice stepped through the looking glass, she broke through the fourth wall, crossed the divide and entered a land different to her own. This is why we love books and movies and plays. Because we are transported. We are exposed to a place other than our own. We become someone other than who we are, potentially are provoked into experiencing a set of feelings that are far from commonplace. And as you read this (yes, that was me breaking the fourth wall) you may fairly think, “this is all true, but nothing new.”

Where novelty always returns to the fray is when technological progress marries with creative vision, allowing story-tellers to keep challenging “the imaginary boundary between any fictional work and its audience.” (Wikpedia)

Consider Irmin Roberts’ reverse (dolly) zoom in Vertigo (1958) and Spielberg’s genius-stealing of it for Jaws (1975), in both cases evoking for audiences that “falling-away-from-oneself feeling”.

Consider the way Steadicam inventor Garret Brown tracked Danny’s Big Wheel tricycle tours through the hallways of the Overlook Hotel. Kubrick acknowledged the invaluable contribution Brown made to The Shining, using the Steadicam “as it was intended to be used – as a tool which can help get the lens where it’s wanted in space and time without the classic limitations”.

Consider the genius of Welles, Altman and De Palma and where they respectively placed their lenses to create the opening tracking shots for Touch of Evil (3 mins 20), The Player (8 mins 5) and Bonfire of the Vanities (4 mins 50).

Movies have always provided escapism, for audiences the suspension of everyday proceedings, where we suddenly stop disbelieving, forget who we are, and begin to vicariously experience something else.

In 1978, the marketing of Richard Donner’s Superman promised, “You’ll believe a man can fly”. In 2013, Zach Snyder’s Man of Steel treated us to Superman-cam, of not just watching a 21st C-GI Superman, but being part of scenes as if we could fly as him.

As ‘The Audience’ we have always inclined to step (like Alice) through the fourth wall and project ourselves into the scene – and the latest film-making technologies are making that natural inclination a more immersive, deeply felt experience. The success of Gravity, and particularly the success of the Gravity trailers, provide perfect illustration.

Gravity’s official trailer is close to 11m views on YouTube. It was the highest viewed trailer of all the movies nominated for an Oscar in 2013. Warner Bros produced a total of 41 official videos for the film, generating over 26m views. In consequence they have also re-written the rules for the role of promotional content in a movie’s marketing mix – because the trailers weren’t just serving to tease. They weren’t merely keyhole views of the main event – but visual spectacles in their own right. The official trailer is a 2 min 20 sensation of the very proposition that would have got Gravity the green light in the first place. Just imagine being lost in space, not in the “Danger Will Robinson” sense, but in the trapped in a vacuum, the ultimate bigness of nothing creating the most absolute sense of claustrophobia and despair? You get that experience from the trailer.

The trailer has the potential to become an event on its own merit, to be content that works standalone in its ability to mesmerise and hypnotise.

In the ‘All About Me’ age of social media documentation, first person chronicling and Go Pro capturing, Gravity’s trailer is the perfect content fix. Tellingly, the theatrical poster for Gravity also eschewed famous face exhibiting conventions. Like the image of Jaws ascending on an unsuspecting swimmer, Gravity’s poster shows its own ‘ultimate oh-no moment’, the image of a space man, safety line suddenly broken.

Gravity further evidences that it is a fascinating time for the marketing of movies, and indeed, for movie-making.

Second-generation 3-D is more effectively immersing audiences within ‘The Moment’. 3-D is at last evolving from the gimmickry of shooting arrows at us. With Avatar, Cameron created a very green and vividly rendered world, which started the 3-D ball rolling once again. Certain scenes in Prometheus were better for being seen with depth perception, the technology evoking a viewing experience that paralleled that felt by the characters. And then Alfonso Cuarón came along and changed the game again, making a movie that felt like you were watching from inside a gyroscope.

Whether watching Gravity in 2D or 3D, the experience is captivating, dizzying, disorienting. The audience is afforded 91 minutes of what it must feel like to attend space camp, and then have disaster strike. (Cuarón described his opening tracking shot as “a pain in the ass” – but then, maybe all great art is?)

I suspect Gravity might just be the dawning sun of a new genre in movie making: the ‘super-immersive’ movie concept. It will influence the movies that get produced and how they are later marketed.

While there has always been a connecting thread, a kind of umbilical cord between screen and audience, in where the lens is so remarkably placed, Gravity newly considers ‘the viewing sensation’. Cuarón is re-acknowledging that all the world really is a stage, upon which we have concurrent roles, where we serve as both audience and look to fashion ourselves as protagonist.

The Best Director oscar is gloriously deserving for a movie (and movie concept) that sucks us through the fourth wall and into the illusion of story and space. While we know that we’ll make it out of the movie theatre, our empathy with Sandra Bullock is such that there are moments when we feel it could be touch and go.

Watching Gravity isn’t life threatening, but to steal a line from Robert Redford at the end of The Sting, a tale of illusion and deception, “it sure is close”.

SP.

Article as also appears in The Huffington Post, The Wall and Business 2 Community.

THAT FIRST KISS

 

“That first kiss, that pause, just before, that pause spilling with expectation and possibility. Eyes. Mouth. Parting lips. Anticipation. Closer. Yes. Complicity. A submission, a moment shared in time and trust, a kiss offered, a kiss taken; a first intimacy. Kissing is The Business.”

Remember to Breathe: A novel (2012)

 

It feels like about once a quarter, a new viral ‘pheno-meme’ storms out across the internet. Each example makes it ever-clearer that all content is far from equal. The short form ‘video’ that goes stellar is fast becoming the ‘new broadcast’, not reaching everyone all at once in a single Super Bowl spot buy, but rather multiple millions in an ever skyward arc over a week or two.

Content that gets to 300+ views is an achievement. The 1,000 view marker is wholly kudos deserving as milestone’s go. 1m views? Well, that’s the super leagues, think segments from US chat shows like ‘The Tonight Show’ with Jimmy Fallon. Fallon’s lip sync battle with Paul Rudd – very funny – is clocking close on 8m views. And I still grin when I think of the little ditty Sarah Silverman put together in duet with Matt Damon: 5.9 views.

But the stuff that goes into the tens of millions – wtf, how many views?! – well, that’s simply epic, MASSIVE, a bona fide juddering of the zeitgeist.

The latest content ‘Must See’ is ‘First Kiss’, which I first saw early last week, when it was at around 20m views. Me = late to the party. As you read this, it’ll be north of 60m.

First Kiss got me wondering, why do I like it? Why does it work? What can we learn from it? Why has it caught the touch paper that is cyberspace?

Can viral video be deconstructed, the nature of its allure and communicability be some kind of calculation? Might there just be a genesis code upon which we can devise a circa three minute stream that games the online system? Or is every content pheno-meme something different, each its own exception to any governable rule, where the only thing we can really garner is that each is just bloody good and worth a watch in its own imaginative and inimitable way? I wondered. And I still wonder. And the thing with wondering is that it can easily lead to ‘listing’. Here are seven reasons why First Kiss works:

1. It feels real: ‘Authentic’ seems to be a word that never goes out of fashion in branding, advertising and film-making circles – and certainly, First Kiss doesn’t feel like fakery. It’s intimate, tender, very human; honest. It feels very real. The camera is openly capturing a genuine moment. No one is ‘acting’. And this is the really rather smart bit, because…

2. Its set-up makes it unique: For 99 folk out of 100, whacking a camera in their face changes their behaviour. They freeze, freak, act weird, turn odd. The camera is an invasion. Behaving ‘normally’ in front of a camera is actually abnormal. Curiously, in First Kiss, the camera ‘heightens’ the participant’s ‘naturalness’, first their awkwardness, then everything else. The camera’s presence actually makes the moment. Kissing a stranger is already weird. ‘The Camera’ compliments rather conflicts the weirdness. It adds to and captures and ‘gifts’ us a moment we otherwise would not have had the chance to see.

3. ‘The Familiar’ is flipped: It’s a great one-line concept, a ‘high concept’: “We asked 20 people to kiss for the first time.” But it’s not just 20 people, it’s 20 strangers. A first kiss is normally between two people who know one another on some level, human attraction established. First Kiss flips something universally familiar: make strangers kiss. The result is something awkward… But that’s not awkward. Because there’s consent and curiosity. And the casting of the ‘consentees’ is perfect. Everyone is appealing. They’re not airbrush beautiful. Nor are they ugly. They’re easy to look at.

4. Voyeuristic Permission: The digital age invites us to watch. In the ‘content game’, there is no game if there are no watchers, but understanding the emotional role of the online viewer is key. In Red Bull Stratos: we watch in awe. If watching live: awe and apprehension (will he make it, will he die?). With Epic Split: it’s a retro-rebooted slice of “did he really do that?” With First Kiss, how will they, will they kiss the way they look, what will happen then?

5. It’s ‘Happy-Making’: Human nature is portrayed as we hope, believe and want it to be. People kiss. No one’s hurting anyone. In fact, a few are really getting into it. Afterwards, they’re still goofy, but they’re also closer, different, relieved, relaxed, the intimacy has created something new which we’ve bared witness to. We have witnessed something transformative.

6. It’s nicely done: First Kiss is all very well judged. The emotional tone is just right. The production values are spot on. The monochrome really adds. The soundtrack ‘We Might be Dead Tomorrow’ perfectly complements, as does the absence of any over indulgent graphics or preachy final message. Nothing is heavy-handed.

7. It’s vicarious & prompting: I was having a drink with a film director buddy, recently single, who said it made him want to kiss a stranger, or kiss someone new, or do both. First Kiss is very relatable, emotionally accessible; easy to empathise with and get on the inside of. Even if you don’t want to kiss a stranger, everyone’s got a string of first kisses in their memory vault.

Content that makes us feel better about ourselves, about life, about what it is to be human – this, we are going to be interested in and drawn to.

Whether viewers know it or not, First Kiss was made by 3-employee US fashion brand, Wren. But not knowing doesn’t suddenly make First Kiss less. The film is deliberately, shrewdly, unbranded. To be judged in its own right.

As Melissa Coker, founder of Wren, points out, “It’s a very noisy world out there.” By filming strangers kissing, she has our attention.

SP.

Article as also appears in The Huffington Post, The Wall, Yahoo Business Advisor and Business 2 Community.

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GREAT BRAND THEORY, INVISIBLE DESIGN & NODDY HOLDER

 

“Why not write the crowds into the song?”

 

Some men are born great. Others have greatness thrust upon them. Slightly abridged, but you’ll recognize the line: Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, passing comment on how our natures and our circumstances influence how we step figuratively up to the plate. Philosophically speaking, provocatively speaking, the line is also a bit of cheat in that it mashes together opposing schools of thought.  

 

The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle proposed ‘Great Man Theory’. Carlyle’s thinking was that greatness is the stuff of nature, leadership a slug of DNA code sitting snuggly (or absently) in the double helix. Great men are born that way. That was Carlyle’s reckoning.

 

Tolsty (he of War & Peace and seriously impressive beard) sat on the other side of the debating chamber. Leo argued man’s moments of greatness to ‘zeitgeist theory’, to the times we pass through and how we take whatever slings and arrows on the chin. Context makes us great.

 

As a formula for brands and advertising (and their potential role in culture), I think we can take sage instruction from Messrs.’ Carlyle and Tolstoy. Meaning, for one thing, that ‘the Bard of Avon’ would have also made a damnably shrewd brand builder.

 

I believe brands are made great. In making them great, I’d like to suggest that ‘Great Brand Theory’ is not in isolation and opposition to the zeitgeist. Rather, ‘Great Brand Theory’ is a brand intrinsically so designed that it’s open-minded and adaptive to change. A great brand is a flexible brand. It’s one that knows what to do with the opportunities, as and when they come knocking. Opportunities, of course, are the external factors, as determined by those Tolstoyan circs of the day.

 

The great brands have the skills to surf the zeitgeist’s swells and troughs. Ineffectual brands sink beneath them. With a final glug that’s equally ineffectual.

 

And in ensuring that brands surf rather than sink, a singularly simple question arises. What is our zeitgeist, ‘der Geist seiner Zeit’ (as Gerg Hegel phrased it back in 1848), this spirit of our 2014 times?

 

Certainly enough, it is a digital one. Meaning it is a technologically-empowered one. A creatively-enabled one. A ‘mobile computer in our pocket that connects us to the world’ one. By consequence, it is a liberated one, in that the Digital Age gives all voice and invites us all to like/comment/share and tweet/post/upload.

 

Our zeitgeist is not one where anyone’s role is that of passive and mute witness. Our zeitgeist is one of being actively invited to get stuck in and a play a part. And this all has huge implications for how brands can make themselves great, and how advertising must consider the role it gives people. Which brings me to Noddy Holder (and isn’t the non sequitur it may appear).

 

You may well be as familiar with the work of Slade as you are with the frequently quoted lines of Shakespeare. And even if you’re not so au fait with the former, I’d wager you could sing along to ‘Cum on Feel the Noize’, a track that first entered the UK charts at number 1 back in February 1973. It stayed there throughout March, selling half million copies in its first 3 weeks. It is said that the factory couldn’t press the vinyl’s quickly enough. Ten years later, US heavy metal group Quiet Riot achieved massive success, sold 6 million copies of their cover version, and then in 1996, UK pub rockers Oasis paid homage with their own take.

 

‘Cum on Feel the Noize’ might be a seriously good tune to mosh or jog to, but I also believe its success is due to what it’s about. I think it resonates with audiences, because it’s about them.

 

‘Cum On Feel the Noize’ saw Slade attempt to “recreate and write about the atmosphere at their gigs”. Front man Noddy Holder recalled it as, "how I had felt the sound of the crowd pounding in my chest". Co-writer Jim Lea added, “I thought — why not write the crowd into the songs.” (Source: Wikipedia)

 

“Why not write the crowds into the song?” I love this sentiment. I love the acknowledgement that a moment is defined by its audience, that they make it what it is. Without the audience, Holder & Co were just a group of crazy-haired guys up on a stage performing to an empty room.

 

Why not write the consumer into the campaign? Of course, this is what ‘Great Brands’ do. In our connected and converged age, great brands ensure their audience feels the noise by making them the centerpiece of the campaign moment. Great brands acknowledge that it is the contribution, energy and participation of the audience that defines the advertising, so making it a moment full of both noise and feeling. Campaigns that embrace the zeitgeist are campaigns that invite consumers to play their part. Great brands put consumers not just in control but ‘in character’.

 

Bud Light’s 2014 Super Bowl spot, ‘Ian Up For Whatever’ is a perfect example of a brand putting ‘The Consumer’ in character, of literally writing them into the campaign.

 

'Ian Up For Whatever' - Bud Light 2014 Super Bowl (#UpForWhatever)

 

The ad might center on Ian Rappaport, but we enjoy his adventures vicariously, our delight in watching turning the third person narrative into a first person experience. 

 

The Heist, Zombie Run and Tough Mudder are recent additions to this burgeoning cultural trend in “first person/in character/’gamefied’ experiences. We now live in an age where we can hire zombies to chase us, and pay for the pleasure of tackling obstacle courses that electrocute us, while giving us permission to get as muddy as 5 year olds.

 

These very physical experiences reflect what has already taken place online, of the shift from ‘passive observer to active participant’.

 

Culturally, significantly, we’re moving more and more from ‘See it’ to ‘Live it’, meaning the designing of ad campaigns has become the designing of human experiences, of brands creating something for us all to live through.

 

Once upon a time, advertising campaigns were all about visibility. They were messages piped to us through static media channels. A big poster on a big flat poster site. 2D, unmoving, changing every 2 weeks. There was a time when poster sites couldn’t change image in the blink of an eye, and that change could not be prompted by, say, the Sun coming out or the passing of a plane overhead. In our analogue past, ‘media’ was rather unremarkable and ‘The Campaign’ was obvious in intent, on the nose in message, all elements quite literal and clearly visible.

 

We’ve moved from using media that makes the brand message ‘Visible & Literal’ to something that is much more ‘Staged & Revelatory’. 21^st century advertising isn’t simply about the stuff that comes at you head on. It’s about the stuff that comes at you from the side, wraps round you, that creates a narrative context in which you have a role, with a desired emotion being all part of the plan.

 

Great brands are becoming cultural architects, their advertising becoming as much about the stuff you can’t see, constructs of ‘invisible design’, about the deliberate crafting of character-based first-person experiences.

 

Great men, great design, great bands, great brands, great experiences; none of these things happens by chance. In each case, our zeit invites it. But in making it so, we all have our parts to play.

SP.

Article as also appears in The Huffington Post, The Wall, Medium and Business 2 Community.