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Project III: Philip Morris PSA

Description

Another collaboration with Dan "Deutschmark" Matthews. During my senior year of undergraduate, I created dozens of anti-tobacco TV ads for Stamp Out Smoking. Toward the end of the job, I felt myself wanting to ditch any message whatsoever and steer toward the absolute absurd (my final ad featured a talking stuffed monkey named Backy the Tobacco Monkey, who stood for addiction, a monkey on your back.) With this final project, I knew I wanted to revisit this territory, and Dan suggested the idea of producing Philip Morris-funded PSAs: I would do the video; he would do the focus group presentation. While I'd originally thought of careening off into a no-man's land of cigarettes and surrealism, this presented more of a challenge: to juxtapose the purposeful PSA with the purposeless surreal. The result is a combination of cigarette ads as viewed in a dream.

Edited on Pinnacle Studios Version 9 primarily with video of vintage cigarette ads and teenage 'awareness' PSAs. There is also a sequence of Elliot Gould from The Long Goodbye that consists of every moment that he lights up on-screen. Call it "Film Noir in Thirty Seconds."

The narration is me impersonating Richard Nixon impersonating Walter Cronkite whilst channeling McGruff.

Music: Ennio Morricone (Senso 45, Aida Degli Alberi, Sahara), Bernard Herrmann (It's Alive), Jerry Goldsmith (Ace Eli and Rodger of the Skies, The Illustrated Man)

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