“Battle of Los Angeles” Flash Microsite
To promote the highly-anticipated alien invasion movie from South African director Jonathan Liebesman, Sony has unveiled a Flash microsite incorporating faux viral videos with “expert testimony” and “eyewitness accounts” of extraterrestrial incursions. The actual Battle of Los Angeles/Great Los Angeles Air Raid (1942) and other reported UFO sitings and encounters of the 20th century serve as the movie’s historical context and back story.
From the microsite and limited production photos, the Battle of Los Angeles looks to be set in contemporary America rather than—as I’d hoped—just before World War II. Rather than rehash Independence Day, why not let the Greatest Generation take a crack at the aliens? Would the Allies and Axis powers have joined forces to defend the Earth?
Battle of Los Angeles stars Aaron Eckhart and is scheduled for release on March 11, 2011.
Related: The movie was filmed partially in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Why use Baton Rouge as a stand-in for war-ravaged Los Angeles? Check out this New York Times article.
Photo Credit: Richard Cartwright
Pan Am: Messing with an Iconic Logo Design
Interesting piece written by Patrick Smith in his “Ask the Pilot” column at Salon about the bastardization of the classic Pan-Am logo for the sake of merchandising. A small sample:
As discussed in this space before, the current fixation in airline livery design is something I call the GMST, or Generic Meaningless Swoosh Thing (Cosmonaut comment: Amen). (Actually, this was a term concocted by Ask the Pilot reader Amanda Collier several years ago.) Take a look around the tarmac. There are enough streaks, swishes, arcs, twists, swirls and curls out there to make anybody dizzy. The idea, we think, is to suggest a company that is “in motion,” or “moving forward.” In the process, sadly, they have become indistinguishable from one other.
Really nice insight on branding, especially from an airline pilot who clearly has had a lot of time to consider such things.
If you’re over the age of 30, you doubtlessly can conjure a mental image of the iconic blue-and-white globe logo. If not, here it is:
As Smith wrote, it represents a much more glamorous time in airline travel, an era long forgotten in the post-9/11 world of TSA muggings and joyless, amenity-free flights. You might also recall that, in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, at the beginning of the film Dr. Heywood Floyd traveled to the space station via Pan Am:
It is part of how the future of space travel was envisioned through a prism of hope and faith in progress. Now it seems unlikely that such space vehicles will be in use before the mid-21st century.
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