brand-e

Lab works. Power to the Pixel is looking for folk to come along to The Pixel Lab, a cross-media project open to European media professionals. The Lab has a particular focus on the creation, finance and distribution of cross-media properties to create sustainable European media businesses.
PttP will select up to 40 European participants – 20 producers with cross-media projects, and 20 audio-visual professionals without.

Ad fest. Digital content outfit Mofilm has teamed up with five brands to develop a Make An Ad competition for the Tribeca Film Festival. Filmmakers need to grab a brief from Voltaren, Nokia, Lamisal, Nature Valley or Chex Mix, and then come up with a video. Winners get flown to New York for the Tribeca Fest red carpet premier event.
Each brand will rate films according to their originality and execution of the brief. The winning entrant for each brand will win cash and prizes up to $10,000. Second through fifth place will also be awarded cash and prizes, and runner-ups will win Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video Cameras.

By Simon Fuller. Sony, storytelling. Here’s another brand stepping out onto the red carpet and getting involved in showbiz. The Forest Guards – a documentary about a bunch of American home-schooled children who come up with an invention to speedily detect forest fires – was commissioned by Sony Europe, and has just had its premiere in London.
On production duty was London’s Between The Eyes, while film is the first branded entertainment offering from comms strategy group Naked Comms, which works with Sony on its environmental marketing.

Short shots. Filmmaking platform Mofilm has announced the winners of the crowdsourced Barcelona Ad and the Pepsi Short Film Video competitions.
The UK’s Henry Scholfield scooped the former with a video for Samsung called Changing Lives. The jury says it loved the way the film spoofed American sitcoms and comedies ‘while retaining a style and charm all of its own’.

Five live. Philips is pushing deeper into the movie experience to promo its home cinema range of TVs. Last year, the consumer electronics brand teamed with Stink Digital to deliver the award-winning Carousel interactive widescreen film. This year, the brand has joined forces with Ridley Scott Associates to produce a quintet of shorts, Parallel Lines, that will bow on Facebook simultaneously in 10 markets 7th April.
Forty five RSA filmmakers made submissions for the project, and five – Greg Fay, Johnny Hardstaff, Carl Erik Rinsch, Jake Scott (son of Ridley) and Hi-Sim (actually a duo) got the nod to start shooting their dramas, action films, animations, thrillers and sci-fi. Which they duly did. Around the globe.

Interactive tooling. Tod Yeadon believes interactive video can be a simple enough proposition. “Very often brands just want customers to subscribe to offers, and with forms that’s very easy,” video-solutions outfit Quick.tv’s co-founder says. “One example is on launching a new car where what you want is a call-to-action.”