Thank you for sharing. I think there is a future in longer form youtube videos and branded content that works for the creator, the brand and the viewer. This is a fairly low key sell see also Anthony Bourdain's 'Raw Craft' web-series. We've always had to sell to someone or the other, why the hell not like this. Great mini-doc, and frankly I think it is beautiful, which is an important distinction...we aren't saying 'ugly is ok with great content' (although it probably would be), we are saying 'non-technically correct camera decisions' that make beautiful images with great content is ok.

Exactly - it's an ad... '"NY-Z" - an ABSOLUT collaboration with Jay-Z'... LOL! You're amazed that this is impactful??? Um, no offence Sherlock, but this is called "branding" and you can bet your bottom dollar that this was heavily worked. This is not some "artistic" work, and it definitely is NOT a "documentary" - LOL! - it's a branding video, just as McDonald's or Burger King or whoever might do. It's a big, big, big Vodka company part of the French conglomerate Pernod Ricard - which they bought for some $6 Billion dollars. What brands do, is take the product and pair it with a famous performer. Pepsi did it with Michael Jackson. Many liquor companies like to co-brand with famous performers.

Which is fine. But the key take-away is that Jay-Z here is pitching his brand and the Absolut brand and they're helping each other. Both were heavily involved in creating and approving this content. There is not a frame of this footage that has not been approved by Jay-Z's people and by the suits and brand image consultants and advertising executives at Absolut - this was definitely not an "artistic" vision of the director - the director's contribution was there, but only to the extent that any director contributes to the making of a TV commercial - the content is not his, and the execution is heavily controlled by the client. To call it a "documentary" is a joke. It's definitely not.

For all that, it clearly worked on some, because people bought it wholesale. To say it's a documentary is as funny as if you thought an informercial on TV selling an exercise machine was "news", just because it has an "reporter" seeming asking "questions" and talking about the product... LOL!

You are aware that this is one long vodka ad?

I would go further than just content is king. I would say the art of filmmaking is about putting everything together in a way that creates meaning and art. Many of the 'ugly' images are actually beautiful images. There is definitely an obsession with perfect images rather than putting images together perfectly in a way that is artistic and says something.

The very freeing thing is we don't need perfect cameras or perfect images in fact maybe we should if we have limited resources focus on interesting images rather than perfect ones and so we need to work on bringing it all together. Its opens things up cause instead of dotting all the 'i's' on exposure, focus, framing we can be creative and be more original in our style. The director is a photographer who interned under Anne Leibovitz, I think that artistic skill shows through.

*Note also that the sound isn't messy, people can accept a lot of scrambled images but not shit sound.

I wish more discussion was based on the art of filmmaking not pixel peeping/tech discussion. There should be a section on film discussion, theory, what works etc...

I mentioned that in another thread. There are a lot of cameras coming out so it draws people's attention. This is reassuring since I'll be 90 before I get all the technical stuff figured out.