Il Capo




This is an excerpt on NOWNESS from the documentary, Il Capo (The Chief) by Italian filmmaker Yuri Ancarani. The film follows a marble quarry boss who uses simple hand gestures to guide his crew. The topic is fascinating, but what strikes me the most about the excerpt is the wonderful aesthetics created by mixing the beautiful landscape, excellent cinematography, and a super minimal sound design. All you hear are the sounds of the machinery and the massive marble blocks being extracted. It’s all wonderful and worth a look.

Via Kottke

Leica M Edition 60

Anyone have $20,000 to drop on this Leica?

To celebrate of the 60th anniversary of M camera, Leica produced the limited edition Leica M Edition 60. The kit includes a Leica M-P digital camera and the Summilux-M 35 mm f/1.4 ASPH. lens, both created by Audi Design.

This is more of a collectors item than anything, but it’s amazing to see the amount of detail that went into it, even down to the packaging and presentation.

Bentley: Intelligent Details

Intelligent Details is a short documentary film that features Luc Donckerwolke and SangYup Lee, heads of design at Bentley Motors, talking about the Bentley Mulsanne.

What’s really interesting about the film is that it was completely shot using an iPhone 5s, and edited on an iPad Air mounted inside the Mulsanne. The end of the film seems more like an Apple ad than one for Bentley.

The films is proof that consumer products like an iPhone and iPad can be used to create professional quality content. Granted, they used some expensive gear with the iPhone to achieve a lot of the results, but you can still get close to this with just an iPhone.

RTL Nieuws Redesign

RTL Nieuws is The Netherlands’ leading commercial news network, and it recently received a redesign by Mark Porter Associates, Smörgåsbord studio, and John Beckers, with on-air visuals by Universal Everything.

The redesign touches every aspect of the organization, from their digital platforms to the audio soundtrack. Overall, it’s really well done. The branding is very minimal and uses bold typography, iconography and colors to tell the story. The typeface used in the redesign is a customer version of Grafik by Commerical Type. The simple aesthetic really shines on live broadcasts where you don’t get distracted with a ton of visual info. The focus remains on the presenters and the information being communicated.

The excellent case study video above does a great job of showing off the new identity.