I've occupied myself for the past few days playing a marathon game of Risk. Not only did I manage to take back the Ural, but (as you can see from my swarm of red armies on the board) I quickly built myself an empire that stretched from North America to India and mercilessly crushed my two ten year-old opponents!

The countdown to Bear Town's official launch has begun! Barring any unforseen problems (and I never count those out) Bear Town's first "webisode" Side Street Stick-Up will be available online at midnight EST Tuesday, May 4th. That's exactly one year to the day the site went online and nearly ten years since I originally conceived of Bear Town and got started in puppetry.

So I'm excited, but also dreading the next few months which will be filled with frantic puppet building, set construction and writing. Right now I'm planning to post new episodes bi-weekly and I should have five or six in the can by May. How long I can keep up with this kind of demanding schedule remains to be seen, but it should be interesting - and exhausting!

I'm happy to report that another interesting puppet film is about to go in to production...The Lady From Sockholm: A Sock Puppet Film Noir Feature begins shooting in less than two weeks. They're also looking for lots of help with the shoot later this month from folks in the Atlanta area so if you're in Georgia and able to lend them a hand consider giving the producers a shout at info@sockholm.com.

Over the weekend I came across this great little site that has archieved some of Apple's best TV commercials. Apple's most famous commercial was their landmark ad 1984, but my personal favorite has always been the original ad for their "Think Different" campaign in the late 90s.

The commercial is simple and effective. Richard Dreyfuss reads a simple poem over old film clips of some of the 20th century's most original and creative minds including Einstein, Martin Luther King, Picasso, Alfred Hitchcock and others. The subtle commercial message here is of course that we're supposed to believe that Apple "thinks different" just like all of these people did and so creative people should use their products. Now I'm not usually a big fan of TV commercials, but I love this ad because it's as much an ode to creativity as it is an attempt to sell computers.

A high-res version of the ad can be downloaded from here, or dial-up users can see a smaller, lower-res copy on this site.

The full poem written for the campaign (which isn't completely read in this ad) is:

Here's to the crazy ones.

The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules,
and they have no respect for the status quo.

You can praise them, quote them, disagree with them,
disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them...
about the only thing you can't do is ignore them.

Because they change things.

They invent. They imagine. They heal.
They explore. They create. They inspire.
They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that's never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

And while some see them as the crazy ones,
we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Think different.

Posted by Andrew at 1:58 PM | Permalink

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