Are you Reddi for the holidays? And more

Everyone loves to load up on sweets during the holidays. But this year, please enjoy ReddiWip responsibly:

Art Direction/Copy: Ryan Gast | Shooting/Editing: Remsy Atassi | Original Music: Rami Atassi

We’re not affiliated with ReddiWip in any way. We just love the stuff and wanted to have some fun with it. And clearly Ryan was very hungry (that’s him in the video).

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In other news, we’re about to do some shooting for our project, “Empire’s Sky: A Chicago Documentary.” Empire’s Sky is our exploration of how current economic conditions are affecting people’s lives in the diverse city of Chicago. If that sounds a bit general, or you’d like to learn more, download our 2-page brief. And if you’re a Chicagoan interested in getting involved, reach out to us – we’d love to hear from you.

One group of Chicagoans we’ll be profiling is small businesses and their owners. This Friday, we’ll be shooting at Metropolis Coffee in the Rogers Park/Edgewater neighborhood. If you live in Chicago, you probably know that Metropolis makes some of the best coffee around, and they’re also a prominent local business.

We’ll keep you posted, and while the completed documentary is about a year away, we’re putting together a short profile video of Metropolis. It will be up here and on our website in early 2011.

Finally, for anyone interested in the progress of Boxer, I’m making a post tomorrow (or maybe Thursday) about the festivals we’re submitting to in Jan-March 2011. For filmmakers with a limited festival budget (like us), this will also include a discussion of how to get the most out of Withoutabox by using some simple tools to collect and sort data on film festivals.

- Rami

A freezing day outside the studio

Here’s a new 1-minute winter video we shot on a very cold day outside our studio. Set to a little original music:

We met a very friendly man who talked to us about the economy. Look for more short videos from around Chicago, especially concerning the economy, as we start the early stages of our next project – Empire’s Sky: A Chicago Documentary.

In other news here we are very close to completing our Boxer film festival submission schedule for Jan-March 2011. I’ll be making a detailed post soon that will cover our basic strategy and approach to this process.

Also, for Chicagoans interested in Media, Marketing, and Advertising, there’s a MeetUp Event for Chicago Marketing tonight, 6:30 PM at Yak-Zies in Wrigleyville. The topic is mobile media. If you haven’t heard of MeetUp, it’s worth checking out: a great way to connect, meet up (ha-ha), and network with people who share your interests.

Finally, if you have some extra time this week(end), I suggest checking out Benedict Carey’s awesome article on the brain and creative problem solving. In it, Marcel Denesi, an anthropology professor at University of Toronto, discusses puzzle-solving: “It’s all about you, using your own mind, without any method or schema, to restore order from chaos.” She’s talking about crossword puzzles and sudoko. But as an avid chess player, I’m always going on (and on) about the creative element of chess and how a beautiful chess game is not unlike a collaborative artwork – albeit a little more competitive. Check out the article if you can, it’s more focused and better researched than my musings about the Queen’s Gambit.

-Rami