DESIGN OBSERVER: We learn to live with the encroachment of branding into daily life; like the weather, we just accept it as part of everyday living. But the more we become inured to the bludgeoning intrusiveness of commercial lapel-grabbing, the more the brand owners — and the designers who work for them — ramp up their efforts to attract our attention.A world colonized by brands is the theme of a new film by French designers and filmmakers H5. Logorama is a slick 17-minute-long animated movie that appears to lampoon both the Hollywood blockbuster — violent, crude and adrenalized — and the world of branding, a world where logos festoon every surface and where it is customary to be exposed to brand activity at every turn. I say appears to lampoon, because the intention of the filmmakers is unclear. The film is beautifully made. It is set in a fictive LA, or at least a CGI city that lives up to Reyner Banham’s view of Los Angeles as “Autopia” and the city of the “immediate future.” The screen emits a supernatural brightness; colours pop with chromatic intensity; everything is hygienically pure — it’s Die Hard with the product placements taking centre stage — a disaster movie set in Brand Utopia. It’s what will happen when brands make movies, as if they don’t already. The movie tells the story of two cops (Michelin men) chasing a gun-toting, child-kidnapping, bad-guy (Ronald MacDonald) through — in the words of the filmmakers — “an over-marketed world built only from logos and real trademarks.” As motion graphics writer Mark Webster has noted, the film contains numerous subtleties and in-jokes: “The Quicktime wall clock; the Energizer street lamps; the 007 guns and homage to Maurice Binder’s barrel shot; KFC getting flattened by the beef jerky store, Slim Jim; and Ronald McDonald being taken out by Weight Watchers.” Logorama climaxes in a series of cataclysmic natural disasters engulfing this pixel-built city of a million brands. MORE
GIZMODO: The single most clever motion picture I’ve seen this year wasn’t Avatar—it was Logorama, an animated short fitting 2500 logos into a highly entertaining parody of corporate/consumer culture. (Watch it. You’ll thank me when it wins an Oscar.) MORE
DESIGN BOOM: Logorama is a short film by the french collective H5, which visualizes and explores the way that logos are increasingly embedded in our existence. after winning the kodak prix at the cannes film festival this year logorama is being screened at various international locations in the coming months. ‘logorama presents us with an over-marketed world built only from logos and real trademarks that are destroyed by a series of natural disasters (beginning with a hurricane, cyclone, tidal wave…). logotypes are used to describe an alarming universe (similar to the one that we are living in) with all the graphic signs that accompany us everyday in our lives. this over-organized universe is violently transformed by the cataclysm becoming fantastic and absurd. it shows the victory of the creative against the rational, where nature and human fantasy triumph.’ MORE
[h/t to Dan Buskirk]