Monday 2 July 2007

Who would have thought you could make a motorcycle out of cutlery?

'Lunch With A Helmut On' is an absolutely awesome piece of work by the Japanese artist and sculptor Shigeo Fukuda. It's a sculpture made entirely out of knives, forks and spoons which casts the shadow of a motorbike when illuminated correctly. Check this video out:

http://www.illusionworks.com/mod/movies/fukuda/Motorcycle.mpeg

Vorsprung Durch Technik

Audi are a brand who continually innovate with their television advertising, especially with their performance RS line. And I don't define innovation as strapping balloons to cars (like in Ford's new Mondeo advert http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjH4g2lLxAY), but as creating an advert that really engages you emotionally, and leaves you gawking at the telly.

Their best two adverts are probably this one:

'Spider': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD_qkdkTgqU

And this one, which is my favourite:

'Bull': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm6MLwTqG0E

I just love the way that they've defined what the car should be, and then depicted this visually, in such a way that you can make no mistake what the car is like to own. Both adverts start off slowly, making you question what is going on. But they slowly build, and give you an idea of what to expect. The best part of the Spider ad is the bit at the end where the spider runs straight at you only to metamorphose into the car itself. The advert ends with Audi's slogan 'Vorsprung Durch Technik' (German for 'progress/head start through technology') spelt out in web.

The Bull advert is great because of how it slowly builds and slowly builds - at first, you don't know what's going on, but because of the soundtrack you know something very powerful is around. Then the bull breaks through the fence and you know this is an awesomely powerful beast. At the end, you see the bull sidestepping to the left, slowly but surely, which indicates that while the car may be very powerful, it has great control too.

Great stuff. It's good to see car adverts that actually look like car adverts.