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Pulling graphic influences from a variety of sources, Buck delivers one of the most imaginative advertising pieces of 2016.

The post This Buck Piece for David Blaine is One of the Year’s Best Commercial Efforts appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Mr. Seed, a foul mouthed, organic seed evangelist, sheds some light on the fact that today most seeds that grow our food are bred by agrochemical companies to be chemically dependent.

The post ‘Mr. Seed’ by Buck appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Buck created this commercial for Nike’s World Basketball Festival. I’m not fond of the basketball players-wearing-corsets design style, but I like the way the forms break up into abstract shapes during scene transitions. The arbitrary wiggles also seem to owe a lot to a much older animated campaign by Nike. The main reason I’m posting this though is because I’ve been seeing posters for the campaign around New York and shaking my head at how epically unappealing the illustrations are; surprisingly, with the animated abstraction, those same designs look good in motion.

CREDITS:
Creative Director: Ryan Honey
Associate Creative Director: Jeremy Sahlman
Art Director: Joe Mullen
Character Design: Saiman Chow
Design: Joe Mullen
Modeling: Rie Ito, Ivan Sokol, Jens Lindgren, Ana Luisa Santos, Claudio Salas, Jaime Klein
Texturing: Ana Luisa Santos, Jaime Klein, Jorge Canedo, Ivan Sokol
Rigging: Joel Anderson, Jens Lindgren, Matt Everton
Animation 3D: Matt Everton, Steve Day, Alessandro Ceglia, Claudio Salas
Cel Animation: Alessandro Ceglia, Regis Camargo, Will White, Kendra Ryan, Jenny Ko, Claudio Salas, Jorge Canedo
Lighting: Jens Lindgren, Ana Luisa Santos
Compositing: Moses Journey, Claudio Salas, Jens Lindgren
Software Used: Maya, Flash, After Effects
Music and Sound Design: John Black / CypherAudio

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Obama’s leadership. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

Presidents struggle to take charge when crises befall the nation. In the immediate aftermath of disaster, whether it be the terrorist attacks of September 11, Katrina, or a massive oil spill, Presidents Bush and Obama alike have been accused of being slow to take charge. Despite the conventional narrative that crises unite the country and cause us to rally round the flag, the truth is that the American presidency is not an institution to which we quickly rally around because we have unrealistic expectations of what presidents can and should do.

While it has become a presidential cliché to declare, Harry Truman believed, that the “buck stops here,” it never does. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the oil spill disaster in the Gulf. The reason why the cliché doesn’t work is that even if the president may have the will to take charge, he cannot be responsible for someone else’s mistake, and even he is, he and the federal government lacks the technological resources to clean up BP’s spill. Incidentally, the first branch, Congress, ought to have some responsibility too.

Like the press and the American people, the White House clearly has not worked out the ethical boundaries of culpability versus responsibility, which it why it has floundered in articulating, exercising, and then defending the proper role of government in handling the present crisis. All this is compounded by the fact that the American media demands and expects a semblance of control even as nature and a complex reality stacks up against one.

While everyone is asking for it, no one knows what leadership means in this situation. If asked, talking heads would each have a different answer. The fact remains that the White House does not have plenary control over corporations and regulatory agencies, nor should it. The President can entreat other oil companies to chip in, but he does not have the authority to command them to do so. The President can pressure BP to be transparent about its operations, but he cannot seize BP’s assets or command a corporation to deploy its assets whichever way the White House directs.

And so the President has made repeated trips to the Gulf to show that whether or not he is in charge, he is at least in the loop and emotionally invested. Empathy, apparently, is a virtue in presidents if not in judges. We desire “activist” presidents, but events do not always permit them.  If we insist on turning leadership into messiahship, we should hardly be surprised at the president’s showmanship.

Given the contested and myriad models of leadership being purveyed on the Left and Right, it behooves the President, at the very least, to decide exactly and then defend what his leadership amounts to. If Obama believes that the buck really stops at the White House, then, as the Left desires, the regulatory power of the federal government must be considerably increased. If he does not want bigger government, then he needs to educate the American people and the Right that the buck really doesn’t stop with government, but at civil society or somewhere else. Right now Obama hasn’t made up his mind, but in this vacillation he is trying to have his cake and eat i

The mighty Buck creates a fantastic world made entirely of Sherwin Williams’s paint chips. Click on image to see the animated ad, or click here. They mention that this is the first in a series for the paint company. Looking forward to seeing the rest.

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Tags: Animation, Buck, commercials

Lauren, Publicity Assistant

Kathryn Kalinak is Professor of English and Film Studies at Rhode Island College. Her extensive writing on film music includes numerous articles and several books, the most recent of which is Film Music: A Very Short Introduction. Below, she has made predictions for the Oscar Music (Original Score) category, and picked her favorites.

We want to know your thoughts as well! Who do you think will win the Oscar for Original Score? Original Song? Send your predictions to [email protected] by tomorrow, March 6, with the subject line “Oscars” and we’ll send a free copy of Film Music: A Very Short Introduction to the first 5 people who guessed correctly.

We also welcome you to tune in to WNYC at 2pm ET today to hear Kathryn discuss Oscar-nominated music on Soundcheck.

This Sunday’s Oscars will recognize an exceptionally fine slate of film scores, and it’s nice to see such a deserving group of composers. The nominees represent a range of films and scores including the lush and symphonic (Avatar), whimsical (Fantastic Mr. Fox), edgy and tension-producing (The Hurt Locker), eclectic and genre-bending (Sherlock Holmes), and beautifully melodic (Up). While there are always surprises, I’ve considered each composer and score, coming to the following conclusions and predictions.

On Avatar:
James Horner has been around a long time, having been nominated ten times in the last 32 years, and receiving Best Score and Best Song Oscars for Titanic. He’s a pro at what he does best: big, symphonic scores that hearken back to the classical Hollywood studio years. Horner’s music gives Avatar exactly what it needs—warmth and emotional resonance—and connects the audience to a series of images and characters that might be difficult to relate to otherwise. If Horner wins Sunday night, look for the evening to go Avatar’s way.

On Fantastic Mr. Fox