Fashion and Video

A style video with style

I caught this video a few days ago, but watching it has opened up a whole raft of ideas and insights.

First, the video itself.

It’s produced (and I assume that means shot, directed and cut as there are no other credits) by Tyler Manson who works for the rather unfortunately named Acne Productions. Of course, they’re based in Sweden where a) no one has acne and b) maybe Acne in Swedish means ‘excellence’.. but I don’t think so.

In any event, take a look a the video. It is beautfiully shot. As you can see, Manson follows all our rules – like don’t move the camera (except for motivated pans) and the 5-shots.  Watching it, I feel it needs a narrative thread.  I didn’t really understand what was going on until I watched it a second time, and then had to google The Sartorialist to get the whole story. A few lines of narrative could have saved me a lot of time and made the whole experience far more interesting and engaging.

Now, to The Sartorialist.

Scott Schuman, as you can see, has carved a niche for himself in the fashion world by running around New York taking stills of the things he instinctively finds interesting, fashion-wise (if that is a word), and then posting them on line. What I like about his style (and why I think it is of interest to us) is that with camera in hand he follows his instincts.  What draws his attention?  Right after DNMTC, follow your instincts is probably rule #2.  And it seems to work.  I would be curious as to what would happen if we gave him a video camera. I think I am going to email him to see if he’s interested in finding out.

The video, of course, was not made by Scott but by Tyler Manson.  More interestingly, as you will note in the credits, it was sponsored by Intel, the chip manufacturer, for something they called Visual Life.  Well, I thought, this is great.  A major company like Intel is starting to underwrite very high quality videos!  So I went to the Intel site for Visual Life.

They seem to be running a video contest of some kind, but for such a button-down company, the website is something of an incoherent mess.  Never the less, as soon as I figure it out, I will report back to you.  Meanwhile, enjoy Tyler Manson’s lovely film again.  And pay attention to the way he shot it.