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October 19, 2006

Welcome to Idealog Weekly, the free email newsletter for New Zealand commercial creatives, entrepreneurs and anyone rich with ideas.

In this week’s issue: Silicon Welly, a Texan odyssey, life on a Mumbai footpath, colouring the estate, Pedro Almodovar’s Basic Instinct, coming home and the quote of the week.

Silicon Welly

YouTube was created just last year but already Google is ready to stump up US$1.65 billion for the video-sharing site. It’s not hard to find sceptics claiming that the dot-com mania has returned, but unlike last time round many web startups are earning good money. Rupert Murdoch paid US$580 million for MySpace, but he looks set to recoup far more than that in advertising and search revenues. YouTube itself is often panned as a company without a business model but some observers think it has always been profitable.

So where are the bright young things creating kick-ass web businesses in Godzone?

The good news is they’re out there. Take, for example, ProjectX, a team of superbright online mapping gurus who have licensed their technology to Trade Me for its Smaps website and have their sights set on providing mapping tools for the world. Consider also Star Now, an inspired site built by three Wellingtonians on their OE which introduces dancers, actors, models, musicians and reality TV wannabes to casting directors, movie and TV producers and to each other.

Read our feature about the cool new world of the web and learn why it’s a great fit for creative Kiwis—and how we can get a bigger slice of the online action.

(Although I’d like to take the credit for the snappy phrase ‘Silicon Welly’, it was actually coined by Natalie Ferguson of Decisive Flow. Coming soon: the Silicon Welly website!)

A Texan odyssey

Several Weeklies ago we pointed to a wonderful Flight of the Conchords fansite. Tonight at 9.30pm on TV3 don’t miss Flight of the Conchords: a Texan Odyssey, documenting New Zealand’s fourth-best folk guitar-based jazz, techno, hip-hop duo on their journey from Wellington to the legendary South By SouthWest music festival in Austin, Texas. Says FOTC’s Bret McKenzie: “It’s hard to describe this festival. Imagine the Masterton Golden Shears Awards, but multiply it by one thousand and replace the shears with electric guitars. Incredible.”

The Conchords are back in the States, making a pilot for HBO. Before you know it they’ll be the fourth-best folk guitar-based jazz, techno, hip-hop duo on the planet.

Life on a Mumbai footpath

Sometime Idealog contributor Philip Peacocke is recently returned from Mumbai, India, where he shot a film to help raise funds for the crowded city’s street children. “Television is full of commercials portraying poor and underprivileged children in quite a negative way and I wanted to make something more positive,” he says. “I researched Mumbai and discovered there are ten million people living in the slums and three million living on the footpaths in an area the size of Auckland. 300,000 of whom are orphans. In my mind, it intrigued me that I couldn’t picture what a footpath home looked like.

“I travelled alone to India armed with a camera and some preconceived ideas about what and how I would shoot this commercial. When I arrived, the reality of a footpath home among the rubbish was less a physical place, but a true community and much more vibrant and joyful than an average New Zealand suburban house. For two weeks I traveled all over Mumbai filming everything in sight. Everywhere we went there were children living on the streets, on trains, at rail stations.”

Philip returned to Godzone and shot a striking film with local production house Cinematic Alliance. The trailers, in 30-second and 60-second versions, are on YouTube.

Colouring the estate

Sony clearly isn’t afraid of logistics. Not long ago it rolled a bunch of technicolour bouncing balls through a British village. This time it’s taken a creative mixture of paint and high-explosive to touch up a dreary council estate. The shoot iself took ten days and 250 people; the clean-up took 60 people five days! If that was my home I think I’d rather they left the paint in place.

Pedro Almodovar’s Basic Instinct

Ever wonder what Pedro Almodovar would have made of Basic Instinct? What if Lars von Trier had directed Titanic? What would Lord of the Rings directed by Emir Kusturica look like? Neither did we, but now we know anyway, thanks to these advertisements for a Romanian film festival.

Coming home

Bill Mori spent 25 years studying and working in Sydney. Now happily ensconsed as a senior lecturer in photography at AUT, Mori is exhibiting a series of homecoming photographs called, well, Homecoming. It’s at the Artful Gallery, 1 Morgan St, Newmarket, Auckland, running until October 26. Mori will be at the gallery on Saturday from 11am to discuss his work.

Quote of the week

“For New Zealand, what is its creative edge in the world marketplace? It’s our creativity, it’s our innovation. It’s the entrepreneurial spirit that we have.”
—John Clegg of ProjectX

More at Idealog online

Read more on our website: Web exclusives, opinion, Idealog IP and the Idealog blogs. See you at idealog.co.nz.

  Matt Cooney
  Editor

Idealog Weekly is sent to friends, subscribers and registered website users of Idealog magazine.

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