Blog

April 16th, 2013 by Alex F.

April 13th, 2013 by Alex F.

Nike “The Making of Making” from Dana Shaw on Vimeo.

January 20th, 2013 by Alex F.

At Ground Level Research we are big fans of Wes Anderson, no surprise there. Dig this compilation of shots, from above. And here’s a good recent interview with Wes about Moonrise Kingdom and earlier work.

January 10th, 2013 by Alex F.

Though the process of silk screening is not new or revolutionary, it’s incredibly cool to see paint get screened through a fine mesh into an exact image. Brendan N., the owner of Yes Press in Emeryville, CA has been our longtime screen printer of choice. Recently we filmed as Brendan printed a new batch of  Ground Level Research T-Shirts. Email us and let us know if we can send you one. (Right now mostly Men’s Large are in stock.)

August 10th, 2012 by Alex F.

We recently worked with Del Monte Foods. The challenge was to educate an internal culture of some 3,000 people about new consumer segments. The solution was to shoot :90 second episodes that brought these consumers to life. This is the result:

June 20th, 2012 by Alex F.

Here’s a beautifully shot video just out from Apple.

It was shot all over the world by the talented duo behind ZCDC.

June 15th, 2012 by Alex F.

We’ve been working steadily on the creation of the Osmo Nutrition brand, which launched mid-May. So far work has included name and content creation, as well as brand strategy. We also wrote and directed a series of videos to help explain the science behind Osmo to people without a deep understanding of nutrition or physiology. You can see the overview video here:

March 27th, 2012 by Alex F.

My friend Aaron Cooperman, who runs a ski lodge called Sol Mountain, installed this handy “meter reader” so that guests can view how much snow has landed outside his lodge, via webcam. 

January 25th, 2012 by Alex F.

There’s a nice photo essay this week in the Times about guys who paint sides of buildings.

January 17th, 2012 by Alex F.

Walter Isaacson’s recent book on Steve Jobs unpacks Apple’s 1990s Think Different campaign, and the agency’s word choice in particular–something I have to admit I had wondered about before:

Isaacson writes: “They debated the grammatical issue: If ‘different’ was supposed to modify the verb ‘think,’ it should be an adverb, as in ‘think differently.’ But Jobs insisted that he wanted ‘different’ to be used as a noun, as in ‘think victory’ or ‘think beauty.’ Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in ‘think big.’ Jobs later explained, ‘We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.’”

I’d always read the tag line as being a command for people to think in a new way, to think differently, to essentially change how their brain thought. But Jobs’ quotes make it clear that he wanted it to be about the content of that thought–to think different at every turn. Subtle differences, to be sure.

Also the book reproduces the text of the awesome 1995 “Here’s to the Crazy Ones” campaign. Narrated in its final form by Richard Dreyfuss, it’s a strong piece of advertising to be sure:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. – Apple Inc.

And here’s Jobs on a PBS show expanding on the Think Different notion in a compelling way: