George Lucas is a one-of-a-kind three-in-one genius. I give him this title because he not only imagined and wrote and conceived a brilliant story called Star Wars, but also managed to put his own money at stake and produce the film version, brilliantly directed by himself. So while I was engaged in checking out the extra featurettes disc of ‘Episode I: The Phantom Menace’ DVD, here’s what the master storyteller-producer-director had to say about the art of the movies…
Am back in Chennai, India and have about a month of free time to do whatever I please, before I head off and spin the account planning turntable at McCann Erickson Singapore. What better time to catch up on things that you have been planning to do for sometime, but never got to do. And for me one of those things was watching the Star Wars series from Episode I to ‘The Return of the Jedi’. It’s the right time to recapture the technological and storytelling grandeur of the sci-fi epic saga by watching it in chronological order.
I just finished Episode I: The Phantom Menace and in fact sort of liked it way better than I did when I first watched it on the big screen back in 1999. I think the superb DVD quality and getting to watch it plonked in the comforts of your brand new lazy boy chair gives it a new dimension. And you can put subtitles on (when Jar-Jar Bings opens his mouth) and go back and forth between scenes at your own whim and fancy. Catch bits of dialogue you missed, get to watch the podracing sequence three times in a row and catch up on some amazing behind the scenes featurettes.
And before I sign off here’s some Star Wars wisdom from the hero and mentor of Episode I, Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn.
And last but not the least…
[Source: John Leland's book 'Hip: The History']
How I wish I was a kid all over again. Innocent and exploring stuff all the time.
Here is an example of a brand quote that seems to have transcended even the above average threshold of loyalty. This corporate top dog seems to be cardinally loyal to Google. Not that Google is nothing short of a great utilitarian site, but this is quite the heights. And the scary part is it’s sort of true too.
“Google is like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere, and God sees everything. Any questions in the world, you ask Google.” – Alan Cohen (Vice-President of Airespace, a company which sells wireless technology now acquired by Cisco Systems)
[Source: From Thomas Friedman’s book ‘The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century’]
You can draw inspiration from sketchings, paintings and drawings on Time magazine’s Top 50 Coolest Websites of 2006 listed Drawn!
“Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.” - Bruce Mau in ‘Life Style’
[Source: From an entry in the W+K Studio blog]
“Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.” – Mark Twain
In 40 B.C. the Roman poet Virgil mused that “Fortune favors the bold”.
Much later in the 19th century Louis Pasteur modified Virgil’s quote to “Fortune favors the prepared mind”.
So we can boldy conclude without any pretensions that a prepared mind = boldness.
From the annals of dot-com history comes this great brand quote:
“Netscape was not a dot-com. We did not participate in the dot-com bubble. We started the dot-com bubble.” - Jim Barksdale (Former CEO of Netscape Communications)
[From Thomas Friedman's book 'The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century]
