a COMMON story wins at TED Ads Worth Spreading!

Last week we were extremely proud to attend the celebration for winners of TED's Ads Worth Spreading award.  The short film we made with Alex Bogusky for COMMON, his new project with his wife Ana and partners Rob Schuhan and John Beilenberg, was selected as one of fifteen honorable mentions.  It was also  one of the few pieces selected that were made specifically for the Ads Worth Spreading platform.

Alex wrote about the experience of creating this film with us here, and we wanted to thank him in return for being rock and roll about the whole thing.  It was a crazy undertaking, but we believe in the vision and are proud to have played our part.

COMMON is a collaborative network for rapidly prototyping social ventures under a unified brand.  Read more about it here, and learn how to join the community.

You can see what the TED panel wrote about a COMMON story here, and check out the rest of the winners.

Also, we took this photo for our parents:

Matthew Dear Live

The m ss ng p eces team has had a longstanding mutual lovefest with the groundbreaking music label Ghostly International (fun fact: Ghostly CEO and founder Sam Valenti was a PA on the 2010 Behind the TED Talk documentary and is a very talented card loader, among other things).

A couple of us hung out with Ghostly super talent Matthew Dear and created an immersive short film to capture the experience of preparing for his live show.

We made some conceptual rules on the day of the shoot: there was no script, we could only use sound recorded on that day, and we wanted to avoid live music cliches.

Special thanks to director Sam Fleischner for crushing it, and editor extraordinaire Robert Lopuski for contributing his visual genius.  You can see Matthew Dear's Black City European tour dates here.