One of the innumerable lists of best Super Bowl Commercials
Next week is the arrival of one of the key American media events of the year: the Super Bowl. Talking with people today in the halls of virtually any school or workplace across the nation, there typically seems to be as much excitement about the commercials as the game itself among the millions of people who will be watching the event (clearly, while they are also eating: the Super Bowl has become the second-largest day of food consumption in the U.S. after Thanksgiving and ahead of all the other holidays – so the advertisers are clearly doing something right!… or wrong, depending on your perspective from a health standpoint).
So, I will be updating my extended Close-Up Interview with Kevin Goff, which is featured in Chapter 3 of Moving Images: “Sound and Image.” Check it out along with the links to some of his finest material.
Also, in celebration of the art of creative advertising, here is a link to an article from Paste magazine that features ads from some of the most celebrated filmmakers of the past few decades (Michel Gondry, Spikes Jonze and Lee, Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, and others). Soon, the juries will be out on a new slate of “Super Bowl Commercials,” which sometimes seem to be more passionate debates than about the merits of the game itself!
mediateacherdotnet 
[…] So this is the intro to the exercise: In this unit, you study the invention of moving images and the advances made in visual communication by early moviemakers. For this class exercise, you will explore possibilities of motion picture storytelling through the creation of a short movie designed to communicate a simple idea to an audience. For this project, you will determine a topic appropriate for a message at your school. This may be a public service announcement, a promotional piece for a school group, club, or team, or a commercial for a school enterprise. Along with studying examples from the early years of cinema, from Lumière and Méliès shorts and The Great Train Robbery to more advanced silents including selections from Fritz Lang’s The Spies, we also study contemporary examples of non-dialogue movies, such as Mark Osborne’s More (which is on the Moving Images DVD) and Mark Gustafson‘s Mr. Resistor. Since this project had to meet the distinct needs of commercials or PSAs (in our case, to last between one and two minutes), we also watched previous standout student work in this vein in addition to commercials such as Volkswagen’s “The Force” (which premiered during the 2011 Super Bowl). […]
[…] a sly ad that played during this year’s Super Bowl, one commercial messed around with our media literacy backgrounds through the familiar […]
[…] challenges presented by commercial work have been explored in Moving Images and in previous posts on this blog, including an appreciation of Saul Bass and the close-up interview with Kevin Goff, […]