Up sees Pixar return to the former glory of Toy Story. I saw this version in the 3D format which was fun and well worth the extra $5 but by no way added anything to the story at all. It would be just as good in regular everyday normal format and on the small screen too.

Like all animation, the voices are a vital part of the movie. And perhaps for me this was the only slight downfall to Up. Ed Asner, a perennial TV actor, leads the cast as Carl. I haven’t seen Mr Asner in anything since he did a few episodes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, the cult behind the scenes series that tried to take The West Wing plot and put it in the context of Saturday Night Live. Even here that sounds ridiculous but it worked very well for anyone with an IQ above room temperature. Network heads being network heads proved they don’t have this level of intelligence and the show was axed after one season. It was actually almost cancelled half way through but enough fans got behind the show and were able to get the network to at least wrap up all the story lines with a full season of 24 eps. (FYI The West Wing and Studio 60 were both created and in the main written by Aaron Sorkin – one of my favourite writers.)

The voice actor adds a multitude of layers to the character and a lot of those layers come from their real life persona. Up was not promoted with the usual fanfare of other animated features where the voice actors lead the way. This is typical too of most live action features as well. And for the first time it hit my that I wasn’t able to have any connection with the animated character because I didn’t know the human behind the character. Christopher Plummer lends his voice to the bad guy in a stellar performance.

I have the upmost (that’s deliberate) respect for Mr Asner and Mr Plummer and firmly believe that their and the other voice actors should have been  better utilised in the marketing of this film. For the benefit of the adult patrons – kids couldn’t care less.

Also interestingly Up features a short animated film about a stork and the clouds who create babies. For parents who have ever been faced with the question from their child, “where do babies comes from?” this excellent short answers the question beautifully.

Great article from the masters of mischief about PepsiCo ceasing its US$1.3 Billion dollar advertising budget.*

*This article proudly brought to you by our sponsors. That’s them, just under the ‘Print’ button in the ‘Article Tools’ box.

This interesting article from Fast Company features new research that proves 9 ways you can increase the ‘retweeting’ of your tweets.

Interesting stuff except that it’s one of those research projects where now that the evidence has been published, the circumstances will change. I predict within 6 weeks, if not sooner , these ‘rules’ will be out the window.

A common occurrence with this kind of ‘benefit’ research is that the mid section of the bell curve (the big bit) will adopt these tactics in their tweeting methodology. On some levels that is not so bad. I for one like complete sentences and punctuation. I also like that if the majority of people adopted and adhered to Point 3 then twitter traffic would drop by at least 50% and therefore junk tweets may disappear altogether. Epic Win!

But if everyone tweets, as per Point 9, at 4Pm on Fridays, then there is going to be an Epic Fail as twitter falls over.

Just when I was starting to think that news.com.au was lifting their game comes this story;

Advertisers pay for personal Facebook information

Shock horror! Oh, the humanity. On what planet does this constitute news. It may be to the ‘journalist’ who wrote this story but for every other person on Facebook its well known. Actually, expected.

Perhaps rather than coming from a journo this ‘story’ has fallen from the mind of a Myspace (owned by News Corp) PR hack and published on all their sites in some half hearted and poorly conceived strategy to bolster the flagging fortunes of Myspace.

And the comments on the story should give the editors some food for thought – if they do in fact think at all. Consumers expect to be advertised to when they receive a service for free.

Stories like this prove that news.com.au and the larger organisation is out of touch with their audience.

They are starting to know me too well.

Story at news.com.au
I just want to borrow a dollar from everyone of you for a day. I promise to give it back tomorrow. Deal?

This is Philips new ad for their latest TV range. Apart from being an amazing piece of SFX cinematography, this ad is not for TV or cinema release. It’s purely for viral marketing.