Month / February 2016

The Forest

You wake up in a clearing in the middle of a forest. You’ve never been there before and have no idea how you got there. The forest appears vast and impenetrable on all sides. How do you get out? As far as you can tell the land is flat in every direction. No direction looks more promising than any other.

Picking a direction at random you set off into the trees. A short while later you stop. Is this the direction you should be going? Will this direction get you out? You look ahead into the trees hoping to see something that will tell you you’re going the right way. Seeing nothing you head back to the clearing.

The next day you go again. Picking a different direction at random. Again you stop, see nothing ahead that tells you that you’re on the right path. Again you turn around.

You do the same the following day. And the day after. And the day after.

If you keep trying new directions but don’t stick with one you’ll never get out of the forest. Commit to a direction and eventually you’ll emerge on the other side of the forest.

We can learn how to do anything. Writing, web design, film making, photography, basketball, football, guitar, drums, science. Anything. We try things and discard them. Sometimes because we don’t like them once we’ve tried them. Sometimes because we get lazy or it gets too hard. Sometimes picking a different direction is the right thing to do. But eventually you have to choose, pick something, tackle the difficult bits and work through them. Otherwise you’re stuck in the clearing.

Escape the clearing.

by Colin Brosnan

New Jobs for Connected Speakers

My wife and I work from home and listen to music while working most days. Recently we bought two Sonos speakers to do that. One for upstairs and one for downstairs. We went with Sonos because the speakers can connect to each other to play the same music on one speaker or all. They do that job pretty well but there’s more jobs they could do.

There are apps (such as Voxer) that allow you to use your phone as a walkie talkie. Why not something that would connect to your wireless speakers to use them as a PA system. Could be very handy to let someone know that there was a cup of tea waiting for them and to hurry up before it goes cold. This could be integrated into the Sonos app itself. As it turns out an app already exists, Sonos Voice, that does the job. It’s not made by Sonos and has some issues with delays but it works fine.

Much of the other jobs I can think of are variations of automation. Chiming at the top of the hour. Pause a playlist and switch to news radio at a particular time everyday and switch back again five minutes later. If someone is out of the house to announce the person is on the way home once they pass a certain distance from the GPS coordinates of the house.

No doubt there are plenty more possibilities and no doubt they will happen in time.

by Colin Brosnan

To the Audience, It’s Always Paid For

Have you seen Deadpool yet? There’s a scene in the movie that includes Ikea products, both on screen and in the dialogue. Ikea ends up being the butt of a joke. Even so, guaranteed plenty people who’ve seen the movie think Ikea paid to be included. They didn’t get paid, but they didn’t block the joke either.

Just because there’ a brand in the movie doesn’t mean it is product placement. It has to be paid to be product placement. The audience doesn’t know that. They can’t tell which placement was paid for and which wasn’t. Which means that to the audience every placement is a paid placement.

by Colin Brosnan

Product Placement and Artistic Integrity

I’ve got no problem with brands appearing in movies. So long as it’s done right. If it diminishes the artistic integrity of the film, causing it to become a commercial, it’s not done right.

Sometimes the integrity of a movie is upheld by making sure a brand is visible in a scene. Whatever is being filmed might mean that a brand should be included as it would naturally occur there in the wild (so to speak). For example a shot of a car driving along a road towards us. As we see the front of the car in the shot it would be normal to see the logo. The audience would probably find it stranger and more distracting not to have the brand in the scene. In this case if the logo was removed or taped off. Including an invented logo on the car would likely have a similar effect.

Product placements that evolve naturally from the script are usually more credible. Had the script not pointed towards a need for a particular placement then it is likely to stick out and compromise the integrity of the movie. For example, having a character drive a Volvo can help to underline or establish that character’s desire for safety. A Porsche would give a different impression. Matching a movie with the right brands is essential for credibility. Filmmakers do this in pre-production through brand line-ups called ‘show and tells’ to determine which brands best suit a film and its characters.

Picking the right brand isn’t enough. It has to appear naturally. If the appearance of the brand seems contrived or awkward it lessens the artistic integrity of the film. Giving a brand undue attention usually indicates a movie’s creative integrity has been violated. But not always, sometimes the circumstances of a movie demand a slow pan across a logo.

How often a brand shows up in a movie is another issue. As indeed is the total number of products placed. Again context is everything.

It doesn’t matter what the filmmaker does. Follow the rules. Break the rules. Just as long as it works for the movie.

by Colin Brosnan

We Are Already Cyborgs

I’m a cyborg. You’re a cyborg. We are all become cyborgs.

It’s our mobiles. We can’t do without them. Lose your phone or break it and you’ll feel like you’re missing an arm. We rely on our phones as extra limbs. Our phones augment our abilities and make us more capable than a normal human. Instead of needing to recall every piece of information we can outsource our memory to Google and others. Without effort we can search for information we never had.

To be a cyborg in the strictest sense the technology would need to be embedded in our bodies. We are not yet at that stage but for many our phones may as well be surgically attached.

This is the first step to humankind’s evolution to cyborg. The next is wearable technology. Then we will implant the technology we already use.

Our transformation from Homo sapiens to Homo machina is well underway.

by Colin Brosnan

Paying to Be In a Work of Art Isn’t New

For some allowing anything commercial to have any level of influence on a movie robs it of something. Worthiness or some such probably. Thus they see product placement as a corruption of the film art form.

I don’t agree. Not entirely. Product placement can be done badly and distract the audience. But it doesn’t have to be done badly. Being paid to include something in an artwork doesn’t have to diminish it.

Product placement can be seen as akin to the depiction of donors in paintings as transpired around the time of the Renaissance. In Masaccio’s Trinity (circa 1428) the donor and his wife are depicted praying. They are outside the arch, on a lower level, and at the same scale as the other figures in the painting. Titan’s Pesaro Madonna, painted between 1519 and 1526, includes donor portraits of five members of the commissioning Pesaro family.

The Renaissance isn’t the earliest period when donor portraits appeared. Anicia Juliana is depicted in a donor portrait in the Vienna Dioscurides, one of the earliest and most lavish illuminated manuscripts still in existence.

An artist’s costs were covered by donors. Product placement helps filmmakers with the cost of making their movie or its promotion.

Donors appearing in paintings was an extensive practice. We don’t look at these paintings and think that including the donor has somehow made them lessened them. No, we look at them and see art.

by Colin Brosnan

Product Placement Categories

There are three categories that product placement in movies fall into. Visual, audio, and plot placements. The terms themselves are pretty self explanatory.

Visual Placement

Visual placement is when a brand or recognisable product appears on screen. Not all visual placements are the same. How prominent a brand is in a visual placement is determined by factors like the style of the camera shot, and the number of on screen appearances. Visual placements include outdoor advertisements in urban scenes or food brands in kitchen scenes.

Audio Placement

Audio placement is when a brand appears on the audio track. Generally this means the brand is mentioned in the dialogue by a character. The prominence of an audio placement is determined by a number of factors. The context the brand is mentioned in. The frequency at which the brand is mentioned. The emphasis put on the brand name (tone of voice, place in dialogue, who the character speaking is, etc).

Plot Placement

Brands or products can only show up in movies in two ways. Seeing them or hearing about them – visual and audio placements. A plot placement can be visual or auditory or a combination of both. What makes it a plot placement is the level of connection the brand has with the story or a character. The more central to the plot, or identifiable with a character the brand is the higher the level of intensity the plot placement has.

by Colin Brosnan

What is Product Placement?

Product placement is when a brand or product is integrated into a movie through an agreement between the filmmakers and the brand owners. The filmmakers don’t do it out of a desire to be nice to the poor brand owners either. Nope, ‘pay me’ they say. It doesn’t have to be cash. It could also be through some form of promotional exposure.

This is different to brand clearance where the filmmakers want to, or need to, include a brand in a movie and need to get permission from the brand owner. The filmmaker wants to use a brand as a creative tool.

From the viewpoint of the brand owner product placement is a tool to promote their brand. That doesn’t stop the filmmaker from being able to use it as a creative tool. Nor should it.

Either way once a brand is in a movie the audience has no way of knowing if the filmmaker got paid to include it or not.

by Colin Brosnan