(image: https://www.superdream.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/who-are-todays-creative-innovators.jpg alt: who are todays creative innovators)
Monday was the fiftieth anniversary of the death of silent movie star (link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buster_Keaton text: Buster Keaton). His fame has been eclipsed by the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, but Keaton was a true auteur, a deadpan creative genius who wrote, directed and starred in his own films until the onset of the “talkies” dashed his career.
He was a true innovator of modern film. He did his greatest work in the early days of Hollywood, and was one of the key, and often unacknowledged, authors of film language, inventing camera and editing techniques, and special effects to bring his brilliant and elaborate gags to life.
Film writer Scott Smith says, “His final self-produced film, The Cameraman (1928), was consistently used by major studios to train new cameramen and second-unit crews in the standards of (link: https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/the-film-100-buster-keaton-no-8 text: comedic moviemaking).”
One of Keaton’s greatest accomplishments was Sherlock Jr. (1924), the story of a movie projectionist who dreams himself into the movie playing onscreen, the story of which starts to mirror his own problems.
Technically, it’s astounding for its time, and even watching it today in the age of digital trickery, it’s impossible to not be dumbfounded by what Keaton achieves. As Buster’s character joins the film playing onscreen, for instance, “the scenery keeps changing behind the hero, such that a bench is removed before he can sit on it, an ordinary street turns into a steep cliff before he can walk off-frame, and a mound of dirt in the desert becomes a rock on an ocean shore as the tide crashes in. Every bad thing that happens to the projectionist occurs in the space of a cut…” You can, incidentally, find the rest of this thoughtful analysis of Sherlock Jr. on the (now sadly defunct) film website (link: https://thedissolve.com/features/movie-of-the-week/526-the-boxes-and-lines-of-sherlock-jr/ text: the Dissolve).
One of the most jaw-dropping moments is when Buster seems to actually jump THROUGH the body of another character an effect that was actually achieved in camera, without a cut.
(youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA8rrAqip8E)
This lengthy preface is a clumsy attempt to look at the innovation of today. The reason Buster Keaton is worth writing about in a blog about creative advertising is that he was never constrained by a medium that was in its infancy. When he wanted to do something, he wasn’t dissuaded by it not having been done before. He just did it. If it hadn’t been done before, he found a way to make it happen.
Today, across advertising, art and commerce, we look to the digital world for innovation, for the NEW. There are great examples of it in advertising. Fiat ‘Live World’, for example, was a fully interactive car showroom, that you could experience sitting in front of your computer.
Other advertising agencies are pushing brands into the space of using technology to solve problems and even save lives. Look at Volvo (link: http://www.volvocars.com/uk/about/our-innovations/lifepaint text: “Life Paint”) (mentioned several times (link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/no-more-ads/ text: on this very blog)) or at what Australian telecommunications brand Optus did to help (link: http://www.contagious.com/blogs/news-and-views/14448441-lifesaving-signals text: prevent shark attacks).
There’s a whole category at the Cannes advertising (link: https://www.canneslions.com/lions_innovation/ text: festival for innovation). It describes itself as “an exploration of data and tech as catalysts for creativity.”
Advertising is no longer in its infancy – it long ago had its language written, its conventions drafted. But it seems to me that there is always room to do things that have never been done before, new ways to shoot the lights out, to innovate and think differently, or simply, as in the brief career of Buster Keaton, to delight.