Hopefully no one comes at me with a fasces...
I should say, as a qualifier, that it is my friend's company and that I always felt stirred in some way by her presence and all she does, both in a positive and negative way simultaneously, so that this cannot help but be a very biased and colorful view.
First of all, she and her husband produced the trailer for what looks to be an incredibly good film when they and the director get the financial backing to finish it. It appears to be their baby right now, as in, it is the work they are most proud of and rightly so. It's called, "A Thousand And One Journeys" (https://vimeo.com44550024) and is about Arab-Americans in the USA and both their struggles to adapt and ways that they were already adapted fine as Americans when they were still on the boat. The trailer consists of bits of interviews of faces I recognize and faces I don't recognize sharing primarily about their values and what they bring to a situation instead of seeking to take away from it. These are among the people who built the country, in every sense of the word, and they make no bones in saying exactly that, which I think is great. Modio-Media's obsession with Italy and with the video image disappears altogether behind the passion of telling the story, which is terrific. A++ I can hardly wait to see it when it's done. If I had the money I'd ask to invest in it myself.
I have more mixed feelings about the promo films for Modio-Media as a whole, however. If you truly have a product that could win you customer loyalty, Modio-Media is right for you, but if your product is just the envelope it was supposed to come in, I'd not trouble with it. Other than that, it appears to be a tiny studio with THX potential, but I found most of its promos aesthetically upsetting on a deep level and I want to explain why because I think it might get people curious about seeing for themselves and that could eventually win the company clients. They're capable of uplifting work, but only in the hands of an uplifting client with the vision to engage them in creative dialogue about the project. Gia admits it haas mostly "Italy-focused content," which is fine for clients in Italy, but I clicked on "television" to look for a promo film for CNN and found this newsclip that horrified me. It start to tell a story of the fires in the MidWest, but includes this agonizing footage of a rescue worker being dragged up accidentally into a helicopter (he survived), followed by a hospital corridor full of enhanced images of the arms of reporters holding microphones politely crammed together against both walls while the smoke inhalation victim from the first shot, having gotten to the hospital, comes crashing through them on a gurney...It's even more grotesque than I make it sound, defensibly Saturnalian, and displaying in every way the camera's overdeveloped eye for beauty and obsession for workers. But then I thought, too, that more people work and see themselves as workers than care about fire victims so that the imagery makes use of the psychological technique known as "masking" to use exaggerated details of workers as an Everyman for seducing a lukewarm audience into fascination with the story. It can then proceed to tell about people needing our compassion or admiration or whatever. The only reason a sensitive person may feel revolted by the apparent fascism of the heroic proportions and obsession with nationality is because a truly sensitive person will feel revolted by the fascism they live in every day, whatever country we happen to be in or feel most kinship to. And no aesthetic can bear the distinction of being more fascist than another, it's apples and oranges. Besides, I'm only complaining about what I feel to be the most original of the promo films. "A Thousand And One Journeys" shows how majestic and sublime their work can also be.
I should say, as a qualifier, that it is my friend's company and that I always felt stirred in some way by her presence and all she does, both in a positive and negative way simultaneously, so that this cannot help but be a very biased and colorful view.
First of all, she and her husband produced the trailer for what looks to be an incredibly good film when they and the director get the financial backing to finish it. It appears to be their baby right now, as in, it is the work they are most proud of and rightly so. It's called, "A Thousand And One Journeys" (https://vimeo.com44550024) and is about Arab-Americans in the USA and both their struggles to adapt and ways that they were already adapted fine as Americans when they were still on the boat. The trailer consists of bits of interviews of faces I recognize and faces I don't recognize sharing primarily about their values and what they bring to a situation instead of seeking to take away from it. These are among the people who built the country, in every sense of the word, and they make no bones in saying exactly that, which I think is great. Modio-Media's obsession with Italy and with the video image disappears altogether behind the passion of telling the story, which is terrific. A++ I can hardly wait to see it when it's done. If I had the money I'd ask to invest in it myself.
I have more mixed feelings about the promo films for Modio-Media as a whole, however. If you truly have a product that could win you customer loyalty, Modio-Media is right for you, but if your product is just the envelope it was supposed to come in, I'd not trouble with it. Other than that, it appears to be a tiny studio with THX potential, but I found most of its promos aesthetically upsetting on a deep level and I want to explain why because I think it might get people curious about seeing for themselves and that could eventually win the company clients. They're capable of uplifting work, but only in the hands of an uplifting client with the vision to engage them in creative dialogue about the project. Gia admits it haas mostly "Italy-focused content," which is fine for clients in Italy, but I clicked on "television" to look for a promo film for CNN and found this newsclip that horrified me. It start to tell a story of the fires in the MidWest, but includes this agonizing footage of a rescue worker being dragged up accidentally into a helicopter (he survived), followed by a hospital corridor full of enhanced images of the arms of reporters holding microphones politely crammed together against both walls while the smoke inhalation victim from the first shot, having gotten to the hospital, comes crashing through them on a gurney...It's even more grotesque than I make it sound, defensibly Saturnalian, and displaying in every way the camera's overdeveloped eye for beauty and obsession for workers. But then I thought, too, that more people work and see themselves as workers than care about fire victims so that the imagery makes use of the psychological technique known as "masking" to use exaggerated details of workers as an Everyman for seducing a lukewarm audience into fascination with the story. It can then proceed to tell about people needing our compassion or admiration or whatever. The only reason a sensitive person may feel revolted by the apparent fascism of the heroic proportions and obsession with nationality is because a truly sensitive person will feel revolted by the fascism they live in every day, whatever country we happen to be in or feel most kinship to. And no aesthetic can bear the distinction of being more fascist than another, it's apples and oranges. Besides, I'm only complaining about what I feel to be the most original of the promo films. "A Thousand And One Journeys" shows how majestic and sublime their work can also be.
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