Mag for Black Collar Workers

Arena Magazine Singapore Edition have just launched their first issue. Published by Mediacorp Publishing, the magazine is targeted at media males or as they call it Black Collar Worker (BCW) - creative or entrepreneurial types that only wear black, black and black. A decent first effort, the mag has interviews with Blond Bond, O&M's Tham Khai Meng in black and Singapore Dreaming's Colin Goh. Check it out at newstands if your collar is darker then the fine leather on your shoes. Ahem, I did.

View CNA video coverage of Arena Launch

Yahoo! Time Capsule

The Yahoo! Time Capsule project just beamed their first 2006 collection of pictures, videos, poems and stories on the canyon walls that cradle one of the world's oldest known communities at the ancient pueblo of Jemez in New Mexico. The time capsule project, with hopes to chronicle humanity across the globe, also shot the images to E.T. at home in space via a digital laser light beam from the canyon. Contributions to the time capsule include Deepak Chopra's 'anti-war' thoughts and comics from director John Woo.

Check out the Live Webcast: Yahoo! Time Capsule

Friday Foo-ism

A moment of Friday Foo-ism...

"The Singapore film industry is still ‘cowboy town’. You ‘Have Gun Will Travel’, brandishing a ‘Fistful of Dollars’, dealing with ‘the Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ trying not to face the audience ‘Unforgiven’.

In a cowboy town, the writer is the swing-door salon owner who sets up the bar waiting for thirsty cowboys (directors) who will come in for their creative elixir, only to be caught in a confrontation between the sheriff (producer?) and the cowboy, most of the time leaving the salon riddled with bullet holes."

Read more : Screenplayer Interview with Indie producer Juan Foo

Tiger Beer Films

In the tradition of the very successful BMW Films and other branded content, comes Singapore's very own (and first?) branded short film campaign for Tiger Beer. Tiger Beer: Unravel The Secret was produced by Leo Burnett Singapore, shot by DP John Seale of The English Patient and Cold Mountain fame and directed by his son Derin Seale. The 9 month John Lone-ish production looks period-fancy and expensive we must say. ('xept for that Tiger tat)

Unravel it for yourself: Tiger Beer: Unravel The Secret

Erhm. where's Jessica?

Gut Branding

Branding and marketing is all about buzz words and new coinages every quarter. And the time is ours now to make a prediction, or dare we say an invention, of the next big thing - a new brand of branding. Lets call it Gut Branding. Gut, as in Gut Feel.

What is Gut Branding?
Funny you should ask. Gut Branding is what it is. Going with your Gut. You have to feel before others can truly feel it too.

The feelings and emotional subscription of consumers are highly sought after these days. Everyone's talking about Emotional Design, Emotional Branding and Experiential Marketing. Brands all want their consumers to "feel" them these days and not rationalise them. The global subconsciousness trend after this post-whatever era is about "Emotion, emotion, feeling, feeling, I feel, You feel, We feel, Me feel". Its almost a renaissance!! So what better way to win this tug of emotions then by feeling it yourself. Feel your own brand gut. Process. Implement. We are all consumers, at the end of the day, be we owners of brands and products ourselves, yes?

You feeling this Gut Branding?
See. Told you so.

And you heard it here first!

2D to 3D anyone?

Nifty cool graduate research efforts in Geometrically Coherent Image Interpretation - reading 2 dimensional images and photos, recognizing known objects (e.g. people, houses, cars, trees), positions and materials (e.g. grass, sand, rock, foliage) and converting the image automatically into 3 Dimensions.

Check out the interesting results for yourself: Automatic Photo Pop-up

Lim's Untold Beauty takes a walk on Wild Side

Hearty congrats to Roy and Juan!

Source: Silvia Wong @ [Screendaily]

France’s Wild Side Films has taken on the French rights to Singapore new writer-director Roy Lim’s Untold Beauty, the debut project of two start-up production houses from Singapore, Rebel Productions and Shooting Gallery Motion Pictures.

The acquisition marks the first pre-sale ever of an independent Singapore film to a major territory.

“We are always in search of emerging talents from Asia and we think Roy Lim can be one of them,” says Wild Side Films CEO Manuel Chiche. “The Untold Beauty script is dealing with a subject we haven't seen often on the screen – an embalmer's life and his place in Chinese culture, with poetry and thrills, and we think it can be a very original movie that will make you tear and fear.”

The picture is a horror love story that revolves around a Chinese embalmer who views death emotionlessly until he has to confront the haunting of his loved one. Through post-mortem and embalming rites, Lim wants to show death in a different light.

“The fear of death and the thought of passing a threshold between life and death are interesting yet fearful. The embalming craft is not only for preservation but ritual and symbolic. Yet embalmers in some cultures are considered taboo and shunned,” he says.

Rebel Productions was set up by Lim as a production company. He also runs a distribution outfit Storm Pictures which previously handled the release of such foreign films as Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible in Singapore.

Untold Beauty has an estimated budget of $1m. Production is expected to start early next year. Producer Juan Foo of Shooting Gallery is currently in Pusan in discussion with international sales agents to represent the film.

Video is the Internet Star!

They say Content is King. What they forgot to mention was the chariot that ferries the King is gold! Internet King Google have just confirmed buying their golden online video chariot, YouTube for US$1.65Billion.

"The new-media paradigm of on-demand, downloaded, streamed and shared digital video is the powerful catalyst behind the Google-YouTube deal, which will become a growth driver for all content players smart enough to heed the call.

Google's $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube underscores the importance of interactive video even to an Internet juggernaut whose statistical mastery of word search and human behavior has sputtered through the image business from maps to video clips to stock photos and mash-ups. YouTube is the expensive jump-start Google needs to continue pioneering a broadband nation, pursuing its mission to "organize the world's information," and take video aggregation, creation and sharing to the next level."

Read more: Hollywoodreporter.com

UnderworldLive|Cocoon

Underworld & DJ Sven Vath live set at Club Cocoon.

"Cocoon Club was conceived as an avant-garde field experiment for transforming space and perception. As such it provides the ideal backdrop for this collaboration which extends to all aspects of the show’s production — Underworld, Sven, the space, crowd, light, film, sound and Internet.""

Check it out:UnderworldLive|Cocoon

Video billed the internet star

GOOGLE is expected early this week to announce a $1.6 billion deal to acquire YouTube, the video-sharing website that has been one of the fastest success stories on the internet. Although YouTube is currently void of any revenues, it holds pole position in online video audiences ahead of Google, MySpace, MSN and Yahoo.

Read More: Times Online

Brand: Scarface

Source: Hollywoodreporter.com

More than 20 years after its theatrical release, "Scarface" still is considered by some to be the consummate gangster film; over the past decade, the Universal Studios Consumer Products Group -- through its licensing program -- has managed to leverage the popularity of the "Scarface" brand far beyond the film's original cult following.

Today, "Scarface" resonates with a new generation of viewers that relates to the outsider status of Pacino's antihero and finds truth in the message of societal forces that reward -- however fleetingly -- aggression, naked ambition and greed. That youthful embrace has propelled "Scarface" into a marketing juggernaut, with more than 40 licensees in the U.S. alone that make everything from T-shirts, jackets and skullcaps to comic books, money clips and even a die-cast model of a Cadillac, complete with a miniature Tony Montana in his famous white suit and smoking a cigar.

Read more:
Anatomy of a brand: 'Scarface' By Thomas K. Arnold
From gangland to broadband, Universal builds a business around "Scarface."

Brand identity By Thomas K. Arnold
Laying out the lines on a multiplatform hit.

"Good design is good business."

Tough Love
Business wants to love design, but it's often an awkward romance.

Today, companies are creating products and services that delight customers with the grace of their fit and finish, and their exacting performance. Design, in short, is becoming an ever more important engine of corporate profit: It's no longer enough simply to outperform the competition; to thrive in a world of ceaseless and rapid change, businesspeople have to outimagine the competition as well. They must begin to think--to become--more like designers.

Read more on: FastCompany.Com

Internet Advertising ups share in global market

Source: Reuters News

The Internet will receive a greater share of global advertising spending this year than do outdoor outlets such as billboards, and it is set to overtake radio soon, according to new data released on Monday.

ZenithOptimedia, a media planning and buying firm, said the growth is being driven by smaller brands, which are turning to the Internet because it is relatively cheap and can target their markets effectively.

"It's got a long way to go to catch up with newspapers, but certainly it looks like magazines, in the medium to long term could be on a similar level (with the Internet)," said Jonathan Barnard, head of publications at the media-buying group.

Growth will be driven after 2006 by China, India, Indonesia and Japan, with ad expenditure in China accelerating in the build-up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

V. Galactic got a New Spaceship!

Photo: Ryan Brenizer

Speaking of Space and obits, Virgin Galactic have a new spaceship "SpaceShipTwo", unveiled by the man and his thumbs at Wired's NextFest. They also have a New Website complete with booking form to book your very own $200,000 spot on its maiden space flight scheduled for 2009 (the year before we make contact). We're saving up our frequent flyer points plus plus plus already.

Read more and check out more pictures on Wired.Com.

Muse: Ifs and Duds...

If a distinguished gentleman had business to discuss, a golden opportunity perhaps, and invites you to a serious dialogue at an impressive country club up in the skies so high, where it was compulsory to wear a jacket, perhaps even a tie, then high chances are its a dud.

If that same distinguished gentleman wore a spankingly colourful tie, that he later mentions he painted himself with his own two hands, then high chances are that he micro-manages, and higher chances yet that he has had one too many buds.

If that same gentlemen mentions he was once the youngest recipient of some national art award, then highest chances are its not just a dud, but a big dud.

Plug: Who Knew

Who Knew is a network for the design and distribution of documents that question and interpret contemporary culture. No topic is taboo.

Who Knew is dedicated to supporting graphic design's contribution to the production of knowledge by challenging designers to apply the interpretive power of graphic design to pertinent debates of our time. Who Knew is directed by Joshua Trees for the Graphic Design Department at Art Center College of Design.

You Knew?

Ansari's Blog From Space

Hey all you wannabe bloggers in cyberspace, think you have the most out of this world blog out there? Think again. The most spaced out blog honours goes to Anousheh Ansari, 40 year old femme space cadet who paid $20Million to be a tourist on a Russian spaceflight launched from Kazakhstan. She's got a Space Blog that she's been updating whilst in extraterrestrial orbit. Jumping Jupiter, she's even got a Flickr Photostream. Eat your stars out!

Zune : Like the look and logo?

The Dawn of Zune is nigh. Microsoft's much anticipated iPod Look-alike Killer ala Evil Twin Brother is coming to a shelf near you very soon. What do you think of it's look and logo? Can or not?

InnovatioNation

OCT 11TH - 15TH

Can you remember when computers were the size of refrigerators? How about a disk player the size of a washing machine? Or a mobile phone that you carry around in a briefcase... It was only 25 years ago that the world looked this way. And only 25 years since Singapore embarked on an ambitious plan to build a nation powered by infocomm. Innovationation is a celebration of this story. It offers you a hands-on experience of a world transformed by infocomm.