The Liminal Space

Quick Read: Motion blur in animation, the current pandemic times and quadratic voting systems have one thing in common – they magnify and normalise that moment in time/space/perspective that’s neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’. And that could have its own benefits.

Motion blur is an interesting concept in animation.

In fact it’s a unique technical challenge that consumed Ed Catmull and his team during his early days leading to Pixar Animation. Quoting from his book Creativity, Inc.

“Another technical challenge that occupied us was the need for something called motion blur. With animation in general and computer animation in particular, the images created are in perfect focus. That may sound like a good thing, but in fact, human beings react negatively to it.

When moving objects are in perfect focus, theatregoers experience an unpleasant, strobe-like sensation, which they describe as “jerky.” When watching live-action movies, we don’t perceive this problem because traditional film cameras capture a slight blur in the direction an object is moving. The blur keeps our brains from noticing the sharp edges, and our brains regard this blur as natural. Without motion blur, our brains think something is wrong. So the question for us was how to simulate the blur for animation. If the human eye couldn’t accept computer animation, the field would have no future.“

-From Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

Today, motion blur has its own place in the craft of visual expression across still photography, film making, animation and video games.

Figure-Animation2 (1) — Two animations: with motion blur (left) and without (right) Source

Without that, we’d have no way to capture and process the concept of ‘something being in a state of motion’ – that state of being neither here nor there, that state of ‘in-betweenness’.

At its purest, motion blur could be said to be the visual expression of an abstract concept called ‘liminality’.

What is liminality?

In anthropology, liminality is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. (wikipedia)

Evidently when liminality as a concept was first developed, it was more in the anthropological contexts of rites and rituals. But today, the usage of the term has broadened to describe socio, political and cultural changes across contexts. Sample this, again from Wikipedia..

During liminal periods of all kinds, social hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, continuity of tradition may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt. The dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid, malleable situation that enables new institutions and customs to become established.

–Wikipedia on liminality

Reminds you of something?

To be in today’s pandemic crisis is to be betwixt and between. Our conception of space and time is unmoored from the conventional constructs of ‘home’ and ‘work’.

What does this liminality mean to our individual and collective consciousness? How does this change our relationships with institutions – our offices, schools, places of worship? How does this redefine our notions around concepts like commute, entertainment, socialising? Who knows?

But at least these liminal times are forcing us to question our deeply held assumptions and mental models and be a bit more tolerant to well considered alternatives while arming us with a better compass to help navigate our complex world.

In fact, I tend to wonder if the current Covid times and the recent mass mobilisations in support of movements like Black Lives Matter have a good degree of causality associated with them. Which leads me to..

Liminal Thinking

It might be instructive to take a closer look at the word liminal. It’s a derivative of a Latin root that means threshold – which literally means doorway. Seen with that lens, a threshold is essentially a boundary that marks a point of transition between one state and another.

How do you then find, create and use ‘thresholds’ to create change that matters? How do you deliberately create those opportunities to make a transition from one world view to that of another? What is obvious to you that is not so obvious to someone else? And how do you recognise that?

Liminal Thinking is Dave Gray’s answer to this question through his book by the same name. A quick whiteboard version of his book here.

Our world today, a boiling pot of divisions and polarisations could perhaps do with a dose of liminal thinking so we seek out and normalise that middle ground versus prying it out of shape and character in an attempt to take one side or the other.

And speaking of polarisation

One just needs to look at the democratic politics today to see that one of its key problems is the lack of a middle ground. The result: political polarisation and amplification of extreme views. Now juxtapose that with another key element of our reality – that while we may seem more divided than ever before, many people on all sides of the political spectrum care about the same handful of issues — education, healthcare, pensions, and etc.

So how do we make a provision for the expression and capture of a more nuanced voting preference in a participatory democracy.

One potential answer: quadratic voting. Unlike a binary “yes” or “no” vote for or against one thing, quadratic voting allows a large group of people to to express the degree of their preferences, rather than just the direction of their preferences through a decentralised voting system.

In fact, the Colorado’s legislature has successfully become one of the first test cases for quadratic voting in the public policy realm. This is the remarkable story of how it deployed Quadratic Voting to normalise the middle ground (vs amplifying the bi-partisan extremes) and how it managed to get a ‘better signal with less noise’.

Seventy-second General Assembly first regular session. — Chambers of the Colorado Capitol where the quadratic voting took place. Source

So there we have it, while we see ourselves stuck in an unfavourable state of liminality in the current times, sometimes it is these very liminal spaces that could potentially make allowances for solutions that magnify and normalise perspectives that are unfettered by extreme/bi-partisan imperatives.

And just sometimes it might mean that we become a bit more tolerant, a bit more inclusive in our beliefs and a bit more optimistic as we hope to see our world become a better place.

Noteworthy ingredients – that may or may not have gone into the making of this post:

[Music]: Rainy Night Coffee Shop Ambience with Relaxing Jazz Music
[Did you know]: 4K TVs reduce motion blur and Tom Cruise hates it
[Book]: Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull (highly recommended!)
[Blog]: Ribbonfarm
[Person]: Venkatesh Rao and his interesting book project
[Research Paper]: Liminoid Advertising and Consumer Identity
[Research Paper]: Quadratic Voting by Steven P. Lalley, E. Glen Weyl
[Article]: How digital tools can bolster democracy

[Featured Image: Motion Blur expressed through Still Photography, Source: BGU]

Of Similarities and Split Screen

Quick Read: There are ads that try and communicate a message of ‘contrast’ and there are those that communicate ‘similarity’. While the former type of ads ride on a diverse set of story telling devices, there seems to be an interesting trend in the story telling devices deployed by the latter set. It’s the ‘Split Screen’.

A lot of advertising is meant to tease out / explain / amplify an element of a brand that is supposedly in contrast w.r.t the competition. Think about it for a moment and think of the core narratives behind most of the ads that you see around.

A lot of advertising narratives tend to fall into this camp, where they try to land a message through a narrative that is designed to communicate a contrast – sometimes in a straightforward manner or sometimes in perhaps a tongue in cheek style.

A few share worthy ads of that kind below.

1. Jeep, Anti Manifesto

(Agency: Arnold Worldwide. H/T: Bhatnaturally)

And oh, btw just for fun, see this one and it’s hard to not think that the Jeep’s creative team didn’t have this in mind while conceptualizing the above work.

2. Fevicol, Ezee Spray

(Agency: Ogilvy)

3. Eko Kom, Flight Attendants / Garbage Collectors

(Agency: Havas, Prague. H/T: Bhatnaturally)

As you can see, ads that have ‘contrast’ as the core message, ride on a diverse set of story telling devices.

Interestingly, this is in contrast with ads where ‘similarity’ is the core message.

When similarity is the core message..

.. there seems to be an interesting trend in the story telling devices that most of them seem to draw upon. Most of such narratives are rooted in a singular story telling device – the split screen.

Sample the following examples.

1. The Day Before

(Agency: Leo Burnett Chicago)

2. McDonald’s

(Agency: Agency: Leo Burnett Chicago)

3. John Lewis

(Agency: DDB Worldwide)

4. Coca Cola UK

(Agency: David The Agency, Buenos Aires)

For the record, the split screen as a story telling device has also been used in ads that seek to communicate a contrast.

Like this one from Apple.

In fact this entire campaign for iPhone (in May 2017) had creatives that all used the split screen.

What other story telling devices have caught your eye in the recent past?

(Featured Image: Split screen of Paris Vs New York)

The Stranger Self

Quick Read: Our future selves are strangers to us. For any brand marketer that wants to drive a habit change among people, this could be a million dollar insight.

What advise would you give your younger self?

That’s a common question Tim Ferriss asks his interviewees in The Tim Ferriss Show.

The answers are always wise, instructive and helpful. As they ought to be. For the exercise of looking back and reflecting upon one’s journey so far, tends to be a highly visual and (thereby) a pretty straightforward affair in our minds.

Brands like Tine – a Norwegian Dairy brand – have even used it as a construct to tell one of their stories. (more on this in my older blog post)

The idea of looking into a younger version of oneself was also the central theme of a fascinating photography project called Reflections by Tom Hussey.

Each photograph features a person looking into a mirror and seeing a reflection of his/her significantly younger self. Result – a powerful and a poignant means to communicate the story of someone whose mind has gotten stripped of its more recent memories.

Novartis – the pharma giant, used these photographs towards a campaign for their Exelon Patch – a prescription medicine for Alzheimer’s. (more here)

(Photographs by Tom Hussey as part of his Reflections series)

Now let us try flipping the scenario.

Let us try envisioning our future selves.

Think about it for a moment. Is it as easy as envisioning our past selves?

The answer tends to be in the negative. Well, mostly.

Many studies establish our biological truth that one’s future self is a stranger within each of us. For example, Jason Mitchell – Professor of Psychology at Harvard – has found that when we picture ourselves experiencing something pleasurable a year from now, many of us use the brain areas involved in imagining a stranger.

Biju Dominic’s latest piece is on this very insight and what it could mean for us as a society.

He says that it is this lack of relationship between our present self and our future self that is at the core of many of our behavioural problems — from not saving enough for our retirement to unhealthy lifestyle practices and many more.

This is such a compelling insight that I am tempted to go out on a limb and wager that this lack of a more intuitive relationship between our present and our future selves could actually be the key to solving for classic marketing challenges like low levels of penetration prevalent across several future focussed categories like BFSI (Mutual Funds, Insurance) or Beauty (Anti Ageing) or other FMCG categories (like Oats, Sugar free F&B variants) etc.

The solution to this lies in getting our present self to be more aware of, relate to and empathise with our future self.

Is-that-me-in-the-mirror-1024x682 — Pic Source

But that’s the challenge.

It is known that the feeling of empathy between two persons diminishes as the physical and temporal distance between them increases. So how do we get our present selves to build empathy with a self that is 20 or 30 years ahead in future?

Now that could be a great problem worth solving for, with creative possibilities in marketing communications.

Biju Dominic’s article even provides thought starters for possible approaches. He writes..

Hal Hershfield, a social psychologist at UCLA Anderson found that people who spend a few minutes getting acquainted with a computer-generated simulation of what they might look like in the future were motivated to make better decisions about retirement planning.

Now that’s a spring board of an idea – using computer generated simulation to show what one might look like in the future.

Now hold on to that thought and juxtapose that with this famous Dove Sketches execution.

Do you also see the possibilities that I see?

(Featured Image: The Old Man in the Mirror by Vergyl)

On Stock Footage

Quick Read: The ubiquitous stock footage that we see in most visual media around us can prove to be more influential than we can imagine.

It all started with this video.

Tickets for the Fyre Festival were sold for up to $12,000 with promises of VIP chartered flights, luxury eco-friendly villas and gourmet food. The reality as it turned out over the last few days was very very different. And the Internet has been going crazy over this. (read here, here for more on this)

For me it’s the (above) video that fascinates the most. Composed of what looks like glamorous stock footage and some fancy copy (like, “..on the boundaries of the impossible..”) and made to look more like a video for a bikini fest than that for a music fest, it had all the clippings (pun intended) of an inflated bubble of pseudo reality.

Speaking of stock footage you should read this short poem by Kendra Eash called ..

This is a generic brand video.

It begins with these lines..

We think first
Of vague words that are synonyms for progress
And pair them with footage of a high-speed train.

And goes on to poke fun at the stock language and footage that is often used by brands in their advertising campaigns.

The interesting thing is what Dissolve did with this poem.

With a stroke of marketing genius, Dissolve – a stock footage company went ahead and made a video of this poem using (surprise, surprise) its own stock footage and turned it into an ad for itself!

The result – work that is in equal parts parody and ad that went on to win the 2015 Shorty Award for Best in B2B. See the video here.

Extending this thought over the years, Dissolve brilliantly leveraged the US Presidential elections campaign and made This Is a Generic Presidential Campaign Ad on very similar lines. This again won them a Shorty Award for 2017.

Now with the ‘Fyre Festival Fiasco’ I really hope they go ahead and make a ‘This Is a Generic Music Festival Video Ad’.

Can stock footage say anything about us as a society?

A lot, it turns out.

Mindshare in Denmark tapped into an insight around how the advertising industry has been perpetuating stereotypes around beauty over the years (knowingly or otherwise).

So they turned to one of the largest stock footage sites – Shutterstock and devised what they call as Image_Hack as an initiative for the Dove Real Beauty campaign.

Check out this video for more detail.

Though it arguably feels a bit ‘case study-isque’ (you know what I mean) it is definitely an insightful, novel and a refreshing approach to give more wings to the conversation around “Real Beauty”.

One stock photo at a time.

(Bonus Link: Speaking of stock footage, check out this new music video from Cassius, featuring Pharrell Williams and Cat Power. The amount of stock footage the director Alexandre Courtes went through to find all these corresponding split screen images must have been staggering!)

(Featured Image Source: Image_Hack, Photograher: Magnus Ekstrøm)

Contextual Codes

Quick Read: Think Contextual Codes, not Category Codes. Sometimes it could make a massive difference.

Fifty years ago, in the fictional world of Mad Men, Don Draper pitched a bold ad campaign to Heinz.

The ads showed close-ups of food that go great with ketchup— a cheeseburger, french fries, a slice of steak—but without any ketchup in sight.

The tagline: “Pass the Heinz.”

But the Heinz clients in the Mad Men episode called it “half an ad”. They wanted to see the bottle.

No wonder Don didn’t get the account.

But now, in March 2017, in a meta union of advertising’s real and fictional worlds, Heinz green lighted the ads.

The best thing: Heinz is slated to run these ads almost exactly as Draper intended, in print and in OOH executions in the New York City. Read more here.

Heinz OOH — Heinz, At 49th and 7th. NYC, Source

Regardless of the fact that these ads are part PR stunt, part on-brand communications, they have something great going for them.

What’s that?

For an insight into that, see any GoPro ad.

And ask the same question.

What do these GoPro Ads have going for them?

My favorite is the following one. (big H/T to Rob Campbell for this one)

As Rob raves about this ad in his post.

Look at it..Even if you’re not a skier, that photo makes you feel ‘in the action’. Literally in it.

You can feel the snow, the cold, the speed of the World rushing past you.

Then there’s that line, ‘Be A Hero’.

Now compare these GoPro ads to this one from Garmin for the same product category.

Or this one from Nikon.

These are all camera brands trying their hand at the “live action category”.

But seeing these, you could say that Garmin and Nikon have failed to understand a crucial distinction between a camera in the ‘live action category’ and that from the photographic category. Sure, they both involve a lens to capture the action, but fundamentally the rules, values and the culture around these categories are very different.

Quoting Rob again from another post,

GoPro’s success is not just because they were one of the first to exploit this market, but because they were part of the culture that created this market.

They understood these people. What they do. What they want. What they feel.

This knowledge influenced everything, from their positioning through to the style of advertising they created.

The fact that Nikon’s (or Garmin’s) ads show an image that comes from the perspective of watching others do something, highlights how they have failed to understand the audience they are talking to.

So now my question again – what do these ads have going for them?

The New Range Rover Velar’s ad is another case in point.

(Agency: Spark44 . Directed by Chris Palmer of Gorgeous TV)

From the very first second of the ad you are living it.

Thanks to the brilliant sound design, you feel the jungle cruising by you and the night looming over you.

The car almost becomes your sensory vehicle for this experience.

Now, if you look at them all, don’t these great ads have one thing in common?

The Insight

Don Draper’s ‘Pass the Heinz’ creatives or GoPro’s ads or The New Range Rover Velar’s ad stand out because their executions are not about conforming to any of their respective ‘category codes’ but are about staying true to their respective ‘contextual codes’.

That’s perhaps why you don’t need to show the bottle.

As Don Draper said in his Heinz pitch..

“The greatest thing you have working for you is not the photo you take or the picture you paint. It’s the imagination of a consumer. They have no budget, they have no time limit. And if you can get into that space, your ad can run all day.”

(Featured Image: GoPro Ad)

The Overview Effect

Quick read: Overview Effect – a phenomenon from space travel can have some great creative parallels in the arts.

There’s a strange phenomenon that happens to astronauts when they see Earth from space. Most astronauts describe this as a cognitive shift in awareness, a state of mental clarity or a sense of deep connection.

This state called the “overview effect,” occurs when you are flung so far away from Earth that you become totally overwhelmed and awed by the fragility and unity of life on our planet. It’s the uncanny sense of understanding the ‘big picture’ and a humbling appreciation of our infinitesimalness in comparison – all at the same time.

Recently, two creative technologists have created an oddly mesmerizing website that provides something approximating the ‘Overview Effect’ for the rest of us.

Check it out at astronaut.io

screen-shot-2017-01-30-at-5-31-47-pm — astronaut.io

Andrew Wong and James Thompson created an algorithm that picks YouTube videos fitting specific criteria: uploaded within the past week, with generic file names (IMG, MOV WMV) as titles, and zero views. And juxtaposed this seemingly endless stream of random videos against a view of our planet from low Earth orbit. (source)

The result is a fascinating glimpse at the mundane, perplexing, and oftentimes sweet events of everyday life juxtaposed against the monumental, mystical and often times sublime views of the planet earth.

The insight here could be about the possibilities that can be achieved w.r.t driving a shift in the viewers’ perspective when an object is made to interact with a meta object. E.g., what if a character in a story interacts with someone that typically exists in a dimension higher to that of the character, like the author?

Let’s take two examples.

The Gunfighter

Think of an actor in a film as an object.

Now think of the narrator of this film. A narrator is conceptually meant to be at a degree higher in dimension or abstraction vs an actor in that film, in order for him to be able to narrate the story to us. Right?

But what if the actor in the film is made to interact with its narrator?

The result? See it for yourself here. The Gunfighter

Directed by Eric Kissack, The Gunfighter has won several awards across categories like best narrative, best short film, best comedy etc and was the official selection for various film festivals.

Old Mout Cider even commissioned him to shoot a film with the same narrative device for their ad. (see here)

The Museum’s Ghosts

This eponymous photography project by Andrés Wertheim is an experiment on similar lines.

The premise as stated by Andrés Wertheim is simple.

It is assumed that when people go to a museum, they carefully observe the paintings and sculptures and thoroughly read the explanatory panels.

But what if the characters portrayed in nearby paintings looked upon visitors while they aren’t paying attention, what unusual scenes would we find ?

Through double exposures made in camera, Andrés Wertheim merged in a single photoframe, both planes of the visible reality – the audience in a museum’s room and the portrayed characters on the same room’s walls – trying to create a dialogue between them.

The Museum’s Ghosts as a photography project, has also been featured in National Geographic for its creation of such surreal scenes that place art and its observers together in a new imagined dimension.

The bottomline

Whether it’s art walking off the walls to interact with the visitors of a museum, or the characters in a film being able to interact with its’ narrator, or a micro level human narrative getting juxtaposed against the macro level perspective of the planet earth, they all have one thing in common.

They are all examples of objects interacting with meta objects, compelling us to re-evaluate and reconsider our perspectives of the world within and around us – perhaps just like in the ‘Overview Effect’ as experienced by a space walker when looking back at our planet earth.

(Featured Image: Photos being shot from International Space station. Source)