The internet is full of stimuli waiting to be found. The social web helps bubble up gems that are buried in the plethora of choices. Recently, a friend forwarded me a link to an intriguing short film called Logorama.

I usually do not watch videos all the way through, but Logorama captured my imagination (partly due to having done brand work for many years) and the integration of over 10,000 identities contained in the film short. H5, a French graphics and animation studio created this short.

Logorama, was selected at the Week of Criticism at the Cannes Film Festival 2009 and at CineVegas in 2009. The film won the Kodak Prix at Cannes and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 82nd Academy Awards.

The actual story was not interesting. I watched it all the way through because I was unsure if the story was driving the logos or the logos were driving the story. What was compelling were all the prosaic details as the story unfolded and how the logos in the frame of the scene provided a subtext to the meaning of the actual story. Irony abounds in this film and endeared the film concept.
Ludovic Houplain and Antoine Bardou-Jacquet, the principals at H5 were interviewed about Logorama and their perspective highlighted my feelings about the film:

” . . . when people see the film, [viewers] have very different versions of the film depending on their knowledge of the logotypes. . . When we started doing the film, we were writing the story, and at the same time we were doing the casting, browsing all the existing logotypes, almost every one. And we made a catalog of the logos and their shapes. We had a folder of nature, with mountains, with various logo and each time we needed an object to build, we browsed the catalog. It took us a year and a half to have all the logos we needed.”

In western societies, there is a type of a brand-marketplace complex where this integration is so seamless, we don’t really think about it. Product placement in media takes this integration to a new level and the recently released film “The Greatest Story Ever Sold” by Morgan Spurlock.

The French have a knack of using poetic license to comment on contemporary society. Logorama continues in this tradition and I am glad to have experienced it.