These Were Great

Here’s all the Get a Mac ads that ran … 16 years ago?!

The original American advertisements star actor Justin Long as the Mac, and author and humorist John Hodgman as the PC, and were directed by Phil Morrison. The American advertisements also aired on Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand television, and at least 24 of them were dubbed into Spanish, French, German, and Italian. The British campaign stars comedic duo Robert Webb as Mac and David Mitchell as PC while the Japanese campaign features the comedic duo Rahmens. Several of the British and Japanese advertisements, although based on the originals, were slightly altered to better target the new audiences. Both the British and Japanese campaigns also feature several original ads not seen in the American campaign.

The Get a Mac campaign is the successor to the Switch ads that were first broadcast in 2002. Both campaigns were filmed against a plain white background. Apple’s former CEO, Steve Jobs, introduced the campaign during a shareholders meeting the week before the campaign started. The campaign also coincided with a change of signage and employee apparel at Apple retail stores detailing reasons to switch to Macs.

The Get a Mac campaign received the Grand Effie Award in 2007. The song in the commercial is called “Having Trouble Sneezing” by Mark Mothersbaugh.

Down in the Sand

Alan Splet, who worked with David Lynch, remains my sound design hero. And we all acknowledge Ben Burtt. But these Doooooon guys (Mark Mangini and Theo Green) put on a show. I realized from the first minute watching it that the sound was going to be fantastic, and a new article provides some insight:

By way of explaining it to me, Mangini ground his work boot into the soft patch of sand that he had dusted with Rice Krispies. The sand produced a subtle, beguiling crunch, and Villeneuve broke out into a big smile. Though he’d heard it plenty of times in postproduction, he had no idea what the sound designers had concocted to capture that sound.

“I wanted Theo and Mark to have the proper time to investigate and explore and make mistakes,” Villeneuve said. “It’s something I got really traumatized by with my early movies, where you spend years working on a screenplay, then months shooting and editing it, and then right at the end, the sound guy comes and you barely have enough time.”

By hiring his sound designers early and setting them loose, Villeneuve could even take some of their discoveries and weave them into Hans Zimmer’s score, producing a holistic aural experience where the percussive music composition and pervasive sound design can sometimes be mistaken for one another.

And much like a band, the sounds of “Dune” benefited from some intriguing vocalists. To create the Voice, a persuasive way of speaking that allows Paul and his mother (Rebecca Ferguson) to draw on the power of their female ancestors — a witchy order called the Bene Gesserit — Villeneuve and his sound team cast three older women with smoky, commanding voices, then layered their line readings over those of Chalamet and Ferguson.

– Kyle Buchanan, NYT

One of the older women with a smoky voice? Marianne Faithfull.

High In The Sky . . .

. . . is what you would have to be to come up with this.

Inversion is building earth-orbiting capsules to deliver goods anywhere in the world from outer space. To make that a reality, Inversion’s capsule will come through the earth’s atmosphere at about 25 times as fast as the speed of sound . . .

Inversion aims to develop a four-foot-diameter capsule carrying a payload equivalent to the size of a few carry-on suitcases by 2025.

And one day, a shortcut through space could allow for unimaginably fast deliveries — like delivering a New York pizza to San Francisco in 45 minutes.

As you might imagine, there has been no shortage of venture capital to bolster this vision. Story here.

Anamorphic Tesla

“I made from washing machines, televisions, computers, radios, printers, microwaves, videos, speakers, lamps, and various electro appliances portrait of Nikola Tesla, without his invention of alternating current would have none of them could work. This anamorphosis is 3D installation with the resulting 2D effect.”

 – Czech artist Patrik Proško

Chipmunks at 16 RPM

Some genius had the bright idea to play pop hits recorded by
Alvin & The Chipmunks at 16 speed, and we now have
“the most important postpunk/goth album ever recorded.”

Vol I      Vol II

Slip into those sludgy grooves.

Endurance

I need to read the book, it’s all anyone talks about in the comments.

Though I have not yet become the sort of History Dad who has devoured every single book and article ever written about Shackleton’s expedition, it is a story that has fascinated me ever since I first learned about it in grade school. Beyond the gory details about frostbite and shifting ice floes and starvation, what has always stuck with me is the supreme sense of alienation that the story first filled me with. The year 1915 wasn’t that long ago, geologically speaking, and yet to read about what Shackleton and his men experienced is to be confronted with the inconceivable. It gets how cold in Antarctica? Those guys walked how many miles? Pack ice can do what to a ship? I am able to imagine exploring the arctic in the early 20th century no easier than I can imagine exploring Mars today, the only difference being that real human beings actually did the former. The courage (lunacy?) it must have required to journey into such a brutal unknown is something none of us will likely ever be able to understand.

– Tom Ley

Line Goes Up

I watched this over the course of a few days recently. It rocks.

It’s a nerd’s-eye view of crypto/NFT/blockchain etc and looks at the big picture with a keen intellect and dry sense of humor.