To celebrate its new web portal (the city’s websites are going to keep reinventing themselves until they realize that the entire thing sucks horse manure and needs to be replaced from the ground up), Montreal’s library network crowdsourced (through a contest) the making of a minute-and-a-half-long commercial/film about how awesome the libraries are.
The results are pretty impressive. Above is the winner from among the 94(!) videos submitted (they’ve posted all of them to YouTube). It’s slick, heartwarming and even features a few cameos.
The videos use varying styles, including fast-talking animation, generic ad montage with cool music to appeal to a young audience, piano-accompanied first-person documentary targeted toward an even younger demographic, paper-eating film-WTF, silent-movie comedy, dramatic metaphor, creepy stalking, annoyingly-dubbed sock-puppet theatre, animated post-its, animated crumpled-up-pieces-of-paper, people-walking-around-with-numbers-on-their-heads, and, of course, awesome Transformers battle, plus dozens more that I haven’t gotten a chance to watch yet because I really should be going to bed about now.
I agree with you regarding the city websites. They need to start over, make the urls human-readable (what’s with the portailid?hgdfjgfgobblydegook?!?!), and just.. yeah, start over.. :)
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