The Big Brother State

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJTLL1UjvfU[/youtube]

The Big Brother State is a very well made video, explaining the use and dangers of cctv and other surveillance tools. Sadly the website at http://www.bigbrotherstate.com/ seems to not exist anymore.

It summarises the arguments for surveillance and then goes on point out some of the downsides. Visually it is very appealing, the pink and grey aesthetics are easy on the eye, the little bombs and hearts visually represent abstract concepts and ideas and make them more tangible, without making them too concrete. The pink ‘wallpaper’ background is a bit sickly sweet, but adds a self ironic element, which counteracts the somewhat dry and depressing subject matter.

It is made from a mix of footage of real people, 3D and 2D animation, creating a well paced, informative and entertaining little video.

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Visual Pamphlets

There are those ideas for projects that would be great to make, they keep nagging in the background, but there’s always something else happening and you never really get around to tackling them head on.

The idea to make short films about political key concepts is one of them. It first popped up during the Anarchist Bookfair in 2010. (Check out the Virtual Anarchist Bookfair over at Imc London.) We were chatting about how difficult it can be to communicate political ideas, especially more abstract concepts to a wider ‘audience’ (for lack of a better expression). Since the crisis, we keep reading about the market, the free market, debt, and the economy in general. But very few people (me included) actually have a firm grasp on what those terms mean. Even though they are affecting our daily lives very directly, they seem very distant concepts. Of course we are constantly told that we could not expect to understand things, and we should leave them to specialists. To make matters worse, these are the very same “specialists” who triggered the whole crisis. Being specialists and all.

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