Written and Directed by Edoardo Ponti
Starring: Helena Christensen, David Gandy
Executive Producer: Nicolas Roeg (!!!)
DoP: Angus Hudson

“W London lifts the figurative lense cap off of a fictitious guest Alex Worthington. Shot on location in Leicester Square, “Away We Stay” written and directed by Edoardo Ponti, is a romantic tale of love, life and the choices we make in the middle…”

I was torn about featuring this one. It’s all over the net already and it’s not even a fashion film. Still, it’s a good example for what I recently spoke with media agency SWELL about: branded shorts.
Basically, it’s a subtly branded short film featuring a well-known model and some high value aesthetics. It’s quite well done, mind you. But only if you judge it by the criterias of a commercial (even more accurate: of a corporate video). On the other hand, for a dramatic short film, it’s quite mediocre and barely can stay on it’s own feet.

The story of a photographer which looses touch with reality (obviously borrowed from Antonioni’s classic “Blow Up”) lacks any interesting dialogues, original settings or dramatic impact. Director Edoardo Ponti seems quite content with just making pretty (OK – very pretty) and clichéd pictures. Really, this looks and feels like a student film with a way too large budget. But maybe this rant is premature, since this is only the first part in a series (!)…

All in all, looks like it’s still a fair way to go until the ambitious intentions of such a “branded short” can correspond with the artistic demands of “real” filmmaking. Btw, this also goes for Guy Richies recent endeavor into this genre for Dior Homme which felt even more awkward.

However, just watch it and make up your own opinion about it…

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Agency: Fallon London
Directed by: Leila and Damien de Blinkk

It’s obvious that UK based French Connection is very keen on novel marketing strategies. It starts with their acronym, FCUK, which really wants you to misspell/misread it. FCUK was the first brand to use Chatroulette as a viable platform for brand communication and last month they launched Youtique, the first ever Webshop integrated in Youtube.
Beginning of 2010 they also started to release a series of fashion films for their man and woman collections. Something like two dozen films are already done, all of them starting with the voice of a french man, who declares: “This… is ZEY WOMEN” or (you guessed it) “This is… ZEY MEN”. Very charming, nouvelle vague like imagery and a great cast (like Franco-Spanish rising star Astrid Berges-Frisbee, who will be appearing in Pirates of the Caribbean 4) makes for a lot of fun watching those. But it’s not just pretty people in pretty clothes. They got everything right: a well-thought out concept, good scrips, suprisingly good direction by photographers-turned-directors Leila and Damien de Blinkk and a “viral potential” on top of that.
Spring/Summer was all black and white, the new Fall/Winter season was shot by cinematographer Edu Grau (of “A Single Man”-fame) in color. You can check all of the films on FCUK’s youtube-channel.
Let’s hope more fashion brands show some of this boldness and commitment in embracing the great new opportunities that online communication has to offer.

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With H&M, it seems like business as usual when it comes to clever marketing. So, here we go again with a very stylish and simple campaign for their new designer collaborations coming 9th September. Their goal is obvious: all over the net the buzz is on and everyone’s guessing which designer is on board.
What’s unusual here, is that they didn’t use to start campaigning as close to the release date of the actual collections. Also, there is nothing else but the films. H&M has gone true viral with this one, and one week before the official start in the stores new films are still pouring in.
Here are only two examples, you can watch the rest of them on H&M’s own youtube-channel.

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