Studio Audience – Series Two Episode Seven with Vimeo, Apartamento and bread

Remember how that strange girl did that ridiculous song Friday threatening to ruin the best day of the week for EVERYONE? We do too, but in the ongoing effort to repair the aural damage done by her bizarre screeching, the It’s Nice That podcast Studio Audience is here again to soothe your lugholes. This week we’re talking photography, sexy animation and Kevin Bacon, plus Vimeo’s new pay-per-view experiment and the battle of the Christmas ads. Listen out also for a torturous Wizard of Oz reference and the lad klaxon. Enjoy!

Nacho Alegre

A pillar of any culinary scenario, and the ultimate underdog of sustenance — where do you even begin talking about how unbelievable bread is? Well, you can’t, because it’s too good. You’d think that for something this important it would be championed more often, but it took the collective brains of Omar Sosa and Ana Dominguez ofApartamento magazine with the artistic eye of photographer Nacho Alegre to make what can only be described as one of the most perfect homages to bread ever conceived. By selecting what looks like some of the finest bread in the world and stacking it up, Nacho created an appropriately simple and entirely effective still-life photo shoot.
www.itsnicethat.com/articles/nacho-alegre

McBess and Simon: Good Books

Master of sexy, macabre illustration McBess and his long-time Mill collaborator Simon have just finished work on a piece of animation that fuses literature, erotica and mail-order delivery to wonderfully entertaining effect. Not sure what books and a voluptuous bosom have in common? Neither did we, but watch on and everything will be illuminated.
www.itsnicethat.com/articles/good-books

Saatchi & Saatchi: EE Kevin Bacon spot

I don’t work in advertising but if I did, I’d be the guy shouting outlandishly unrealistic ideas during creative meetings much to the chagrin of my colleagues. I like to imagine that’s how the new Saatchi & Saatchi spots for the 4G mobile network EE came about – that from the idea of connectivity came a reference to popular dinner party/drinking game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, and from there someone shouted insolently: “Why don’t we get Kevin Bacon to play his own game?”

And yet they had the good sense to pursue this and sure enough here we are treated to “Hollywood A-lister Kevin Bacon” (his words not mine) explaining how he’s connected to everyone in the universe. Kudos to the creative team for the specific British cultural references which sound fabulously incongruous from KB’s mouth (think Frank Carson and Hollyoaks) and there’s a pleasing smattering of bacon puns too. A charmingly silly idea, scripted brilliantly, and man does it turn out we love Kevin Bacon.
www.itsnicethat.com/articles/saatchi-ee-kevin-bacon

In the second section we talked about Vimeo’s new pay-per view service currently being trailed in beta format on six films. Vimeo say the goal is to “provide an open and flexible platform that allows all creators and content owners to earn revenue directly from their audiences” giving filmmakers “control over pricing, viewing periods, release geography and bonus content features.”
www.vimeo.com

And we also took on Yuletide ads, starting with Hadley Freeman’s beautifully articulate denunciation of the cult of the Christmas ads, before talking John Lewis’ new snowman spot and Morrison’s possibly sexist new piece. In the end though we admitted that cynical creative types aren’t best placed to analyse big, mainstream campaigns such as these.