What’s with all the paint splatter on El Tiempo’s building?
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2012-02-04 1 note
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Plaza de Bolivar
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Smiley faces make everything better
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Guess which one is the counterfeit Colombian peso.
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At Burger King in Bogota, Colombia, they have a counter to order burgers…
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…and a separate counter for dessert
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Cartagena, Colombia
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2012-02-03 0 notes
How Botero is Relevant to Oruga
This morning, our G-Lab team went to the Museo Botero to visit an exhibit by Fernando Botero. The self-anointed “the most Colombian of Colombian artists” is known his unique style of depicting human figures, animals and objects with an exaggerated corpulence to not only celebrate the life within them but also mock their role in the world. Fernando Botero didn’t develop his own style until he was in his early 30s, after he had left Colombia, studied in France and Italy, then moved to Mexico, where he was influenced by Diego Riveria’s mural paintings.
For the past three months or so, our G-Lab team has been reaching out to advertising agencies and sales reps to get critical feedback on our G-Labclient Oruga Touching Dreams’ reel. One of the feedbacks we received from the American ad agencies Oruga Touching Dreams should to develop its own style to succeed in the U.S. because creative directors will often hire animation studios based on whether their style is a good fit for a particular ad campaign. In Colombia, it’s a bit harder for Oruga Touching Dreams to do because oftentimes, their clients will want them to copy ad campaigns from Madison Avenue. That’s not to say that Oruga Touching Dreams hasn’t tried. In 2008, the studio released a 15-minute short-film entitled “En Agosto,” which has a much darker style than a lot of the cartoony animation work that Oruga Touching Dreams normally does. Like Fernando Botero, it may take leaving Colombia for Oruga Touching Dreams to fully develop its own distinctive style. -
2012-01-30 0 notes
What color Shakira’s hair really is
This past week, our team took some time out of our G-Lab project for Oruga Touching Dream and devoted the time help out amplificado.tv. Oruga Touching Dream’s creative director Augusto Caro created amplificado.tv in his spare time to create a platform for Colombian musicians outside the mainstream to showcase their work online. Unfortunately, amplificado.tv’s web site is only in Spanish. Our team spent some time translating and writing much of amplificado.tv’s web site content in English, which will hopefully expose the musicians showcased on amplificado.tv to the world outside of Colombia. As a result, I’ve recently spent a lot of time listening to Colombian music. Reggaeton is really popular here in Colombia.
We were talking about music with Oruga Touching Dream’s CFO Diego Diaz del Castillo Fernandez and inevitably, Shakira came up. Without a doubt, Colombia’s biggest cultural export is Shakira. I learned a three things about Shakira:
1) Before Shakira made the cross over from Colombia to the U.S., she acted in the telenovela El Oasis in 1996. Apparently, Shakira sang at an office holiday party and Diego’s mother, who was an executive at the TV station that broadcast El Oasis at the time, heard her sing and let Shakira sing the theme song for El Oasis, “Lo Mio.”
2) Shakira alienated a lot of her fans in Colombia. According to one theory, an interviewer asked her where she’s from, and instead of saying she’s Colombian, she said that she’s half Lebanese. Shakira was born in Barranquilla, Colombia to an American father of Lebanese descent and a Colombian mother with Italian.
3) Shakira is not a natural blond.
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2012-01-29 0 notes
El que muestra el hambre, no come.
