Stunt City Commercial .mov
May 23, 2005 1:49 PM   Subscribe

Excellent deodorant commercial - "Stunt City" (QT)
by Czech director Ivan Zacharias.
A little background here.
Shot in Australia (I think), post-prod UK - UK/Europe release April. via
posted by peacay (30 comments total)
 
Fantastic! I love the sign on the security guard's desk when the delivery guy brings the package in on the motorcycle.
posted by ktoad at 2:10 PM on May 23, 2005


Nice via. Is that your domain?
posted by WolfDaddy at 2:15 PM on May 23, 2005


*blush* I've got a deposit holding.
posted by peacay at 2:22 PM on May 23, 2005


nice!
posted by tomplus2 at 2:29 PM on May 23, 2005


Anyone got a direct link?
posted by dobbs at 2:31 PM on May 23, 2005


Anybody remember that Chicago video from the early days of MTV that told a little story through dozens of stunts?
posted by fungible at 3:02 PM on May 23, 2005


What a delight!
posted by NickDouglas at 3:17 PM on May 23, 2005


dobbs, that ends up being a direct link. Just right-click to save it and it'll redirect to the .mov.
posted by afiler at 3:20 PM on May 23, 2005


http://www.big-boys.com/articles/ciggirl.html

i like that one better.
posted by ackeber at 3:24 PM on May 23, 2005


dobbs I'm no tekkofile and I did have a real good look around plus I've also got a greasemonkey script plugin thingy that supposedly lets me download all embeddeds. But it would only stream it in another window. I've also searched around on a few vid search engines and I come up with nada. So I'm not sure what afiler means. I'd like a direct link so I can keep the damn thing. *shrug*
posted by peacay at 3:52 PM on May 23, 2005


Peacay, it does look like Sydney, this advert would hold my attention.
posted by Chimp at 4:04 PM on May 23, 2005


Excellent, peacay. For more, see Stink.
posted by Gordon Smith at 4:14 PM on May 23, 2005


Excellent, peacay. For more, see Stink.
posted by Gordon Smith at 4:14 PM PST on May 23

Are you my senator? If so, please contact me at my listed email address so I may tell you how to do your job.

Really excellent commercial. Does anyone use spray-on deodorant?
posted by underer at 4:22 PM on May 23, 2005


afler, that only works if you have QT Pro, which I don't. And the source is somehow bunged.
posted by dobbs at 4:44 PM on May 23, 2005


hey, they have the same ad in the UK but there are slight minor changes in ours (the security guard instead of nodding at the sign, actually pushed the sign to him, different music for ad, for instance). and its for a different deodorant brand! and shorter too.
posted by wessatong at 4:52 PM on May 23, 2005


Does anyone use spray-on deodorant?

Every obnoxious jock at my school wears too much Axe.
posted by Evstar at 4:53 PM on May 23, 2005


OK here's a wma link. I could download it but it's probably my script.
posted by peacay at 5:10 PM on May 23, 2005


Thanks peacay. Here's a direct link to the mpg though not as good in quality as the original link.
posted by dobbs at 5:40 PM on May 23, 2005


Even with QuickTime Pro, the Flash-based player at stink.tv disables QT Pro's "Save As" functionality, but you can discover all the direct links with a bit of poking around and then save them with File -> Save Page As ..., no QT Pro required :)

Here's how you do it in Safari, I have to imagine there's similar facilities in other browsers.

Choose an ad from within the Flash-based player, then open Window -> Activity. You'll see an entry that says looks like this:

http://www.stink.tv/playclip.php?ClipId=10843986

(that one's for the Nike Stylewar ad)

Double-click that URL to open it in a window or tab of its own, which will have a pink background and an embedded QT movie in it. This time, do a View -> View Source and look for a line that looks like this:

http://www.beam.tv/beamreels/play_clip.php?reel_file=vhNPQqrrkM

(Again, from the same Nike ad)

Copy this URL to the clipboard, paste it into a new browser window or tab, append "?action=open" to the URL, and open it. This should just open the QT file in the window, and then you will be able to save it via the file menu.
posted by kcds at 7:51 PM on May 23, 2005


afler, that only works if you have QT Pro, which I don't. And the source is somehow bunged.

I'm confused as to how there's any trouble with this. I didn't click on the playing video, I clicked on the link above. This link. I've tried this on both IE and Firefox on two different machines. One machine can't even play Quicktime videos (no Quicktime or even VLC). I just click on "Excellent deodorant commercial" and pick "Save Link As..." (Firefox) or "Save Target As..." (IE) and it just plain saves. I've got four copies of the damn video downloaded now.

Anyway, I liked the commercial. I'd buy the product (once) if I could.
posted by afiler at 8:06 PM on May 23, 2005


You're completely right afiler. I'd been trying to save it once the screen had come up -- expecting that the [download] button from my script would work. The QT version is different to the wma and much much better quality.
posted by peacay at 9:00 PM on May 23, 2005


The reason it was causing confusion is because when I try to save it (os x; firefox) it was tryiing to save "play_clip.php" and I just kept saying no as I wanted the mpg. However, I just said yes and it downloaded and then I changed the extension from php to mpg and it worked. Weird. Thanks!
posted by dobbs at 9:09 PM on May 23, 2005


Australia requires (or used to require) that ads shown in Australia be shot there. Hence a lot of ads get shot in Oz to avoid having to re-shoot for the Australian market.
posted by QuietDesperation at 10:27 PM on May 23, 2005


What a neat ad. The soundtrack contributes to an impression of carefully choreographed chaos.

Is that your domain?
Also cool. The .org portion was cut off in my "Alert" box.

Every obnoxious jock at my school wears too much Axe.
I got my teen brother a box of that as sort of a joke gift because of the association with the cheesy ads, but when he unwrapped it he seriously thanked me and the family seemed to think it a classy gift.
posted by PY at 11:33 PM on May 23, 2005


Stink has some the best ads in the history of the world.
posted by wsg at 3:33 AM on May 24, 2005


Axe comes in my college's grab bag for freshmen. Rather than use it, we strap duct tape around the cans and fling them, wildly spraying, into each other's rooms.
posted by NickDouglas at 6:53 AM on May 24, 2005


This was indeed cool, as were the Stink ones (I particularly liked Talk Talk). However.

Does it bother anyone else that this kind of creativity shows up in advertisements rather than elsewhere? I'm not trying to start a pissing contest (famous last words around here); what I'm really trying to get at is that I find advertising to be all too prevalent, and I'm sort of disappointed that as cool as some of these are, really they're just shilling some product that I probably don't need. I'm in no way criticizing the work, I liked them a lot. I just... well, I just don't need to see any more ads than are already shoved down my throat every day. I guess I just wish I could see something like this in another place.

NickDouglas: Ah, dorm life. Don't miss it at all ;)
posted by jennaratrix at 7:08 AM on May 24, 2005


Doesn't bother me at all. It's really only the modern age that has given us art outside commercial and political interests. Michelangelo did his work for the church, Mozart for the king. At the end of the day, Mozart was "just making a buck" -- but we all know he was doing far more.

Ads like Stink's cost a lot. There's just no market structure to make them worthwhile without corporate sponsorship. And the idea of the commerce-free artist is really something unthinkable in poorer societies (read: the rest of the world). I know what you're saying, jenna, and I used to feel the same way, but I decided I was only revealing the pretension of Western life and the gross wealth that allows anyone to survive here without actually thinking about money.
posted by NickDouglas at 8:22 AM on May 24, 2005


I hope you didn't just call me pretentious ;)

I'm not sure you really got what I was going for, but I didn't explain it well. I'll just say this - it's a freaking commercial. Yeah, it cost a lot of money. It's artistic. It's pretty, funny, clever, whatever - in the end, it's an ad. It's not about being able to "survive here without actually thinking about money" - it's about the prevalence of advertising and commercialism in our culture.

Maybe it's no worse than it ever was, but I'd argue that creating a neato ad for T Mobile is as little different than writing an opera for the king of Austria. I'm not arguing that the people who created the ad shouldn't be making money for their work; I'd just argue that, artistically, an ad for Volkswagen isn't on the same level with the Sistine Chapel, and I don't think we should even attempt to equate them.

But this is a dead thread, so I'm going to stop there.
posted by jennaratrix at 12:14 PM on May 24, 2005


But that's my point -- commercialism isn't new. Once you start farming, you start selling your crops to someone who doesn't farm. And so you start pitching them. And haggling in an open-air market is as ugly as throwing up billboards.

You're right, I went to far with the Sistene Chapel metaphor. But commercials compare to, say, the posters of the Enlightenment era. And they're a place for actors, writers, directors, and other filmmakers to train so they can graduate to less commercialized films. Auteur Charlie Kaufman (whose Eternal Sunshine deserves as much acclaim as a Marlowe) started in sitcoms; hundreds of actors started as shills. And the "purest" art can be full of shit.

Heh, the horse may be dead, but I'll beat it, dammit. Maybe we should carry on off-mefi.
posted by NickDouglas at 4:22 PM on May 24, 2005


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