Several airlines have decided that typical, stodgy air safety videos aren’t getting the job done, so they’ve gone to great lengths to punch them up with some flair and pinache. And some of those airlines are upping the ante by making their creativity a trend.
I’ve already written about six previous attention-grabbing videos, and here’s a look at three more—the newest offerings from Virgin America and Air New Zealand:
Virgin America Safety Video
A music/dance video featuring past contestants from American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance (with a couple contortionists, too), it’s directed by John M. Chu, the director of Step Up 2, Step Up 3, and Justin Beiber’s Never Say Never. Future inflight-dancer wannabes can Instagram their best moves with #VXsafetydance to audition for a sequel.
Safety Old School Style Air New Zealand’s latest offering stars Betty White and Gavin MacLeod (of The Love Boat—look here if you’re too young to remember). It’s set at the “Second Wind Retirement Resort” and has lots of one-liners and sight gags poking fun at the senior-citizen set.
The Bear Essentials of Safety Man vs. Wild‘s Bear Grylls takes this Air New Zealand video to the great outdoors—New Zealand’s Routeburn Track, to be exact. Take a look if you’d like to see what exit-row lighting would look like if the plane were a cave and glow worms lit the way.
I think it’s time that someone started a set of awards for all these videos. We have the Emmies. We have the Razzies. How about the Safeties?
Evan Penny’s Old Self, Variation #2, an example of hyper-realistic art
Ever since, as a child, I saw Duane Hanson’s lifelike sculpture Janitorat the Milwaukee Art Museum, I’ve loved hyper-realistic art. Then last month, when I visited Crystal Bridges Museum of Modern Art, in Bentonville, Arkansas, I was surprised to see another Hanson work, Man on a Bench. (I really was surprised, since it looked for all the world like a museum visitor taking a break from his tour.) And in a room close by, there was an oversized bust by Evan Penny, Old Self, Variation #2. Unlike with Hanson’s pieces, no one will mistake Old Self for an actual person—it’s only a head with shoulders, and it’s way too big. But still, it just looks so real.
Martin Schoeller is another artist in the same vein, except he doesn’t exactly create hyper realism, he captures it—with a camera. Born in Germany, but now based out of New York, Schoeller is best known for his “hyper-detailed” large-scale portraits of celebrities, which have appeared in magazines such as GQ, The New Yorker, and Entertainment Weekly.
But his photographic subjects also include common people, like you and me. In fact, if you’d like to see what you’d look like in a Schoeller portrait, next time you’re in Bed Bath & Beyond, do like I did and take a look at yourself in the 10x-magnification of the Zadro Dimmable Florescent Dual-Sided Mirror. (That’s hyper realism.)
Schoeller recently took a cover photo for Esquire Russia of Vasiliy Ilyn, a retired farmer from Russia, who’s featured in this month’s magazine. Ilyn is one of Schoeller’s non-celebrity subjects, as the September Esquire is devoted to the rules that govern the lives of ordinary Russians.
For three days, Ilyn was something more than ordinary, as he was flown to New York for the photo shoot. His encounter with the city is chronicled in the 20-minute film Vasily, from Stereotactic. (Thanks to Carla Williams for telling me about the video.)
The film shows Ilyn’s first trip outside the Kursk region of Russia, his first time to see the ocean, and, of course, his first visit to America. As he looks around New York, he’s a fish out of water, but he’s an ordinary fish. And I’m not sure that his reactions are much different from those many retired farmers in the flyover portions of the US would have.
Ilyn narrates the documentary, and he has a lot to say about Russia, the US, and life in general. He thinks of himself as a joker, but much of what he says shows a solemn acceptance of the way things are. He’s pretty straightforward and plain spoken. At one point, while talking about his disdain for past Russian leaders, Ilyn drops an F-bomb. Actually, it’s more of an F-hand grenade since we read it in the subtitles.
When he gets back to his home, he tells a woman about the 80,000 Russians who live in New York. “I wish a flood would come and they would die,” she says. “Let the locals survive, but these traitors should die.”
Ilyn replies, “They were just looking for a better life. . . . Let them go.”
Shoeller’s type of hyper-realism doesn’t come from a lack of preparation and artistic manipulation. The lighting and focus has to be just right, and there’s a lot of time spent on Ilyn’s makeup. But the result is striking for its unglamorized detail.
That’s the way the documentary looks to me, too. I can tell a lot of work went into the making of Vasily, but it’s that work—the shot selection, the editing, the scoring of the music—that makes it feel more real . . . much more real than what usually passes for “reality” on TV today.
It’s been more than a year since I put together my list of online, English-language, international (read, with other than just US destinations) in-flight magazines.
Not long ago, I found 27 more and have added their links to the post. That brings the total to 91.
Nothing beats a good inflight magazine. It’s kind of hard for me to read a book on a flight, maybe because I’m too easily distracted, and I fall asleep too easily. But magazines . . . that’s different. I love the photos of exotic foods, the stories about eccentric locales, the ads for ridiculously expensive watches. Some time ago, I went on the internet to see if any international airlines offered free subscriptions for their magazines. I didn’t find any, but I did discover that several offer them online. Then, when I searched some more, those several turned into a whole lot. So I put together this list (English-language only) and tracked down the links. I’d love to have them all spread out on my coffee table, but since that’s not going to happen, this is the next-best thing. (And in case you think your seat-back pocket is still missing something, I know what it is. What inflight library would be complete without a copy of SkyMall?)
Clearing Customs 