Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/10/18/bose-locks-down-central-london.html
…
"We never quite believed we would actually be able to lock down central London in such heavily populated and high security areas," Grey London executive creative director Dominic Goldman tells AdFreak. "We used a helicopter for the ariel shots, which had understandably strict airspace rules. We held back traffic and people for a few minutes each take. This wasn't easy to produce. Most of this was captured in camera with minimal clean-up in post.""And we did all this to sell headphones."
18 Likes
No way man, that’s incidental. They were just creating art.
6 Likes
“We used a helicopter for the ariel shots”
So, we finally get confirmation of The Little Mermaid live-action movie!
12 Likes
Didn’t they try something similar when they shot 28 days later?
I remember reasding how they got some pretty girls to stop truck traffic at specific spots really early in the morning.
4 Likes
I guess public space in the UK, very public space, is for rent?
3 Likes
I was thinking laundry detergent.
It is pretty common for cities to have some policy by which film companies can provide compensation in return for streets being blocked off. How else can you get movies or TV shows that take place in cities? I don’t know London’s policy, but I hope they got some payment for this.
3 Likes
Yeah, i’m sure i saw an interview with danny boyle where he said that. It doesn’t seem to be in the imdb trivia section anyway.
These high concept ads depress me. I wish we put the same amount of money and effort into real problems instead of something with the only purpose of selling expensive stuff.
3 Likes
Oh, the scope of human endeavor… Such efforts expended… to sell something no one needs. And the degree to which ad men will pat themselves on the back for… what really?
1 Like
The way things are going, it’ll be England’s only reliable source of hard currency in a couple of years time.
4 Likes
Apparently on BB, advertising is evil. Ironic?
Disruptive ad filming: NIMBY, TYVM.
(I thought it was neat)
1 Like
You’re absolutely correct. Only things necessary for life should be sold. Gruel and huts for everyone!
5 Likes
If they’d waited until December 25th, they’d have had the whole of Central London to themselves…
Not gruel and huts, only straw men should be marketed and sold!
5 Likes
We demand that everyone have a job, while making real jobs like farming and mining so efficient that 1% of the population can do them. Advertising is the textbook example of an evolutionary response to this problem. So, arguably, the problem isn’t that “making ads” is taken seriously; it’s that it should be taken way more seriously, so that it’s not the exclusive province of rich white people doing years of unpaid internship.
If a talented artist closed off my street for a massive performance art piece to promote a local bakery, I’d be much less annoyed than if it were done by a production company filming some old bollocks to sell factory-made yogurt or whatever.
4 Likes
Well I applaud the witty response, if not the sentiment that caused the original post. Bobtato actually kind of nails it below, but very few people produce products people need.
Headphones, ironically, are probably closer than a lot of stuff to a spiritual or emotional need, since they are contrivances by which art is appreciated.
2 Likes
I can get behind all of that, particularly the last part. Creativity for creativity’s sake is something we need more of and not just to plug some expensive plastic that’ll be landfill in a few years. With that said, i would like to visit your alternate reality where this happens.
1 Like
Cheers. I totally get what you’re saying… I was certainly being over-dramatic and you’re right– it is actually a tremendous gift that we humans don’t spend all our time wallowing in the dirt.
As a person who works in marketing and makes ads for a living, I get a knee-jerk reaction when I see people working so hard to sell crap. This is deep in the programing I received in art school 
Like bobtato said, I’d prefer they were making art for art’s sake, but this is not a perfect world!
2 Likes
Save money, use CCTV!
2 Likes
I also wish we weren’t hypercapitalists, provided everyone a living wage, etc. As automation/robotization proliferate this ought to happen. Probably won’t see it in my lifetime, alas.
I’d draw a distinction between relatively straightforward goods/services and complex ones. With the former, even extreme localism can make sense. With the latter, it’s questionable whether extreme localism is even workable, and if it is it may well be rather illiberal (assuming that globalization is a kind of society-scale redistribution scheme whereby our wealth gets to others who make comparatively better use of it). To my mind, this seems plausible even accounting for the gross wealth-skewing of rampant capitalism.
Also, certain things we want to do will probably always require impenetrably-big groups (disagreeable hierarchies, bureaucracy, etc) simply because of how fundamentally limited we are as individuals. I don’t see that sort of stuff disappearing even if we luck into a largely post-capitalist, post-“work” future. Maybe I’m too cynical, and too averse to techno-utopianism (and ftm, syndicalism).
