Tuesday, June 13, 2006

You can't spell Evolution without Love


Rhythm Of Life [Album: Motion Picture Soundtrack: Sweet Charity (Decca Broadway)]
Cy Coleman

Commercial for Guiness created by Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO
Click on the photo for the Quicktime version or the click on the button below for the windows video media below. And because I want to acknowledge the creators and animators behind this:
Agency Producer Yvonne Chalkley
Creatives Ian Heartfield, Matt Doman
Production Company Kleinman Productions
Director Daniel Kleinman
Production Company Producer Johnnie Frankel
Editor Steve Gandolfi

VFX Framestore CFC
Telecine Framestore CFC
Post Producer Scott Griffin


11 Comments:

Anonymous said...

What would Jesus do?

Got fresh raw milk? You don't have to believe the world was created in 500 BC or whenever to question whether Jesus was a gun-toten' Guiness/Bud-guzzlin' drone.

Seems to me that Jesus might rather take the ad budget and feed the poor. Helps avoid all the car accidents, wife beating, child abuse, gambling, fights...and the list goes on.

I'm Irish/German American, so I'm 'experienced.' Seems the message is more like 'how does it feel to be one of the beautiful people,' as the Beatles sayeth.

12:16 PM  
coho said...

Hiya, Spocko!

Another fine moment of SpockoVision.

Hiya anonymous person!

1. Jesus was a wine guy.

2. Unless that milk is human it's not quite as good for you as the American Dairy Association would like you to think (Do you know any other animal that consumes the milk of another species regularly and on purpose?).

3. Car accidents, wife beating, child abuse, gambling(?), and sundry other violence upon non-relatives are not caused by alcohol. They are caused by people who make choices without thinking about the ramifications of those choices.

4. Alcohol is a toxic poison. So are nutmeg (great hallucinations right before it kills you stone dead) and oxygen (one of the most corrosive gases around). None of them "make" anything or anyone "do" anything. Ever.

Instead of our current culture of victimhood ("it isn't my fault, it's the drugs/alcohol/peer pressure/bad parents/lack of cable/mean boss/too much or not enough Prozac/PMS/etc...") perhaps we could just, as a people, sack up and take responsibility for our own fucked-uppedness and maybe think before we make choices that will affect other people.


PS. Guinness is only about 4 or 5 percent alcohol and very thick, frequently you'll get full before you can get drunk. And it has lots of vitamins (no kiddin'). Don't speak ill of The Black.

PPS. Sorry 'bout the rant, Spocko, I've been on a tear all day. It's because my country is under the control of what seems to be a retarded chimpanzee.

10:53 PM  
spocko said...

Hi Coho. Rant away. I'm alway glad when you stop by.

I'm really not sure what anonymous is trying to say. I was just amused by the ad and frankly I liked the song. It seems like the only time I hear a new song is through a tv commercial these days.

Your country is under the control of a retarded chimpanzee? Wow that's bad, but not as bad as us. We have George W. Bush in charge. He's the decider.

11:05 PM  
coho said...

George W. Bush...yeah, that's what they call the Chimp-Lipped Ruler on the news...

11:35 PM  
Anonymous said...

1. >>>Jesus was a wine guy.>>>

Yeah right, the Bible is all true -- and the Roman Empire didn't change a thing!

Ok, so it's silly to imagine Jesus with a rifle (courtesy Spocko's brain), but he can work for Madison Avenue selling drugs.

We're so evolved.


2. >>>Unless that milk is human it's not quite as good for you as the American Dairy Association would like you to think (Do you know any other animal that consumes the milk of another species regularly and on purpose?).>>>

Happily we're not any animal, and animal milk and byproducts like yogurt, have been safely consumed to eons.

But I would agree that mass quantities leads to problems and factory farming won't last eons.


3. >>>...sundry other violence upon non-relatives are not caused by alcohol.>>>

Depends on what you mean by caused. You seem to have little experience or appreciation for the problem of addiction and despair. Spend a little time at a shelter, soup kitchen, a block even in in a red light district.

You probably never went on a drunk driving gambling bender with your dad! And feel lucky I didn't grow up in Hunter's Point.


4. >>None of them "make" anything or anyone "do" anything. Ever.>>>

I like the radical spiritual market approach of free will, but it's not that simple. Briefly, 'technology ' is not neutral; eg, an atomic bomb is not neutral even though it does not make anyone trigger it.

Sure you're the decider but the election was rigged. (I wasn't talking about a 'real' US-style election, but same thing.)

I agree that Guiness tastes better than bear piss, but it might be good if Westerners could climb out of the fog, someday because we really screw up.

"MB"

2:08 AM  
coho said...

Hiya, Spocko!

Well rested and fully caffeinated, it begins again.

Hiya, MB!

If humans aren't animals, what are they...plants?

An Eon is quite a bit longer than homo sapiens has been around.

"Caused" means caused, made to happen. And don't make assumptions about others' experiences, you'll almost always be wrong.

"Technology" is made up of inanimate objects. An atomic bomb (or a nuclear one -yes, I know the difference), a TV set, a salad spinner or a car are all equally inanimate, they can't "cause" anything, only be used by someone (or something -if it's a tool user).

10:09 AM  
coho said...

All this from a (really well made) beer commercial? Crazy.

10:10 AM  
Anonymous said...

Hi Coho,

Sure, the buck stops here, but in a complex web of causality it's not always easy to find the breaks.

In Northern California, we can't seem to stop decimating the fish populations, and we're Seattle's future. Who's at fault: gluttonous shortsighted consumers, fishermen, gov't, water use, deforestation, pollution, climate change?

It seems like 'eon' is a good metaphor for this communication. It could mean a long time or it could mean forever. One dictionary says, it means “a great length of time,” “thousands of years.”

Understanding technology is crucial to solving the problem of western civ, which goes way beyond the big turds in office.

Losing control is sometimes only possible if a situation is present -- whether its a drunken murder or a nukeyalure war. Science fiction is crammed full of anthropomorphized machines gone wild.

In a past life as a science policy wonk, my favorite author was Langdon Winner, who wrote the book "Autonomous Technology:"

"...A crucial turning point comes when one is able to acknowledge that modern technics, much more than politics as conventionally understood, now legislates the conditions of human existence. New technologies are institutionalized structures within an existing constitution that gives shape to a new polity, the technopolis in which we do increasingly live. For the most part, this constitution still evolves with little public scrutiny or debate. Shielded by the conviction that technology is neutral and tool-like, a whole new order is built -- piecemeal, step by step, with the parts and pieces linked together in novel ways, without the slightest public awareness or opportunity to dispute the character of the changes underway. It is somnambulism (rather than determinism) that characterizes technological politics -- on the left, right, and center equally."

12:28 PM  
PTCruiser said...

I love Guiness. I often refer to it as "Mother's Milk". Mmmm.

4:49 PM  
coho said...

Hiya Spocko!

Last comment (from me)for the beer commercial post.

Very recently (geologically speaking) the wheel, the pulley and the pointy stick were brand new cutting edge tech. Our tools may be shinier and contain fewer pieces of bone than they once did, but we (as a species) are not defined by our tools, nor are we controlled by them. We choose. "I had no choice" almost always means "I made this choice, but I refuse to take responsibility for my choice because it will make me less popular or it would require further action and I'd rather go watch American Idol/football/porn/cartoons/etc."
The buck does indeed stop here, and there is no "but..." to follow it.

It has been really interesting twisting poor Spocko's humorous (and slickly produced) beer commercial post into a debate about the nature of causality and the impact of technology on human behavior (good and bad), but I'm ready to give him back his blog.

Have a fun day.

8:40 PM  
Anonymous said...

"...we (as a species) are not defined by our tools, nor are we controlled by them. We choose..."

Sure, we choose. If you think the choice between Skull & Bones is more than superficially meaningful.

Why do you things the powers and principalities are so afraid of running out of juice? We can't even run cash registers without electricity.

I hope I'm never like the Reagans, poisoning pot, running coke and all sorts of demonic schemes, then posing for photo ops saying 'just say no' and cutting rehab programs.

Drink up, the party's just about over. Oh yeah, cute commercial.

9:15 PM  

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