In rhetoric, there is something called “affect transfer.” Usually used in visual composition, it’s when you generate an emotional response, and then immediately put it with something to which you’d like people to connect the emotion. In writing, it’s a simple matter of sentence structure. Visually, we tend to be drawn to the center of […]

I managed to find the tiny gravel fire-road in the middle of the woods where we were going to be filming the first shots for a commercial I’d been cast in. How the location scouts had found these roads to begin with, I had no idea. I drove down and found the crew setting up. […]

By now, odds are, you’ve seen or heard about Dove’s “Real Beauty” sketches, in which women are asked to describe themselves for a sketch artist, and then compare those drawings to descriptions of them by another person. If not, here’s the video: It’s an interesting campaign, and one that clearly took a lot of time […]

Ah, I see that you, Australian artist Emma hack, are working on another “automobile made of painted people.”  There’s also those Canadian Ford ads doing something similar. Tough stuff, getting the right people for something like that.  Got to go for the top tier of models.  Sure, the people you got for the previous one […]

“Uncle Byronic?” Yes, adorable little child? “You know those ads for Dr. Pepper 10 that equate drinking diet Dr. Pepper to guns and being a Viking and smashing things with your bare hands and being in a rodeo and stuff?” Sure. “Those are awful.  They make me want to burn things.  How can those exist?” […]

Well, the second ad has been put up, the one I wrote about the other day.  The one involving the cat; the one that was supposed to be ever so simple and wound up… being… not so.  The part that’s kind of tough about people seeing it, is it’s supposed to look quick and cheap […]

I’m currently getting ready to direct a commercial; right now it ‘s in the planning stages.  It’s a low budget ad, just for the Internet.  It’s for this thing that you can use in restaurants where you swipe your card at the table instead of the waiter taking the card and running away and buying […]

The other day I got a phone call from a guy here who’s sort of a film/modeling/TV liaison, asking if I’d be interested in auditioning for a series of commercials.  Now, obviously, commercials are hardly the most riveting things, challenging things, certainly not the most dignified things.  They can be fun to do sometimes, though. […]