{"id":404566,"date":"2010-03-08T17:25:37","date_gmt":"2010-03-08T22:25:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theappleblog.com\/?p=42024"},"modified":"2010-03-08T17:25:37","modified_gmt":"2010-03-08T22:25:37","slug":"apple-at-the-oscars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/404566","title":{"rendered":"Apple at the Oscars"},"content":{"rendered":"

Swapping turtleneck for tuxedo, Steve Jobs made a rare public appearance when he took to the red carpet at the Academy Awards last night, spotted first by eagle-eyed social media maven Wayne Sutton who posted to his blog<\/a>;\u00a0OMG it’s Steve Jobs! I’m the only one yelling at him! #oscars #kodakredcarpet<\/em><\/p>\n

Sutton doesn\u2019t mention whether his yells went unnoticed by His Steveness, but he posted a fantastic snapshot<\/a> of the event to his blog — take a look and see if you can spot El Jobso for yourself (it\u2019s not immediately easy to find him in the crowd, but once you see him, he\u2019s hard to miss!)<\/p>\n

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Image courtesy of Wayne Sutton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The Theme Begins (Prequel to The Oscar Theme)<\/h3>\n

Now why would the normally shy and retiring Steve Jobs be at the Academy Awards Oscar ceremony? Well, he is<\/em> the largest individual shareholder in the Walt Disney Company, to whom he sold Pixar Animation Studios in 2006. Pixar is the legendary computer animation studio responsible for the box office hits Toy Story<\/em> and Finding Nemo<\/em> (to name only two of many others) and its latest CG offering, Up<\/em>, was nominated for an impressive five Academy Awards (and was the first Pixar film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture).<\/p>\n

On the night, Up<\/em> received two of those Oscars; Best Animated Feature<\/em> and Best Original Score<\/em>. Steve didn\u2019t take to the stage to receive the awards, but I\u2019m sure he was grinning from ear to ear like a proud father at his child\u2019s first music recital. <\/span><\/p>\n

The Oscar Theme<\/h3>\n

If you\u2019re interested in the mechanics of modern movie making, you\u2019ll find this fascinating; Macworld UK reports<\/a> that a staggering nine out of ten<\/em> of the Oscar-nominated Documentaries (across both the Short and Feature Documentary categories) were edited on Macs using Final Cut Pro.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re not a movie maker, you might not know that Final Cut Pro is Apple\u2019s pro-level film editing software. Speaking from personal experience of many<\/em> hours spent in many<\/em> darkened editing suites all around the world, there are (broadly speaking) three dominant software editing tools; Avid, Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro. (There are others, of course, but they\u2019re far less commonly used in the film and TV industry.)<\/p>\n

Avid has traditionally been the editing platform of choice and still reigns supreme, though mostly because it has been around since the Stone Age and many long-established editing facilities using Avid suites have long-term service contracts tying them to that platform. But Final Cut Pro (and the Final Cut Studio suite of film making tools) has been gaining ground in recent years, due in part to its relative affordability and Apple\u2019s amazingly progressive efforts to develop and promote new HD codecs and standards, such as the ProRes family. (For more on this, you can watch a video<\/a> on Apple’s Final Cut product pages.)<\/p>\n

That almost all the Award-nominated Short and Feature Documentaries were edited using Final Cut (and, therefore, made on Macs) speaks volumes about filmmakers’ faith in, and trust for, Apple\u2019s technologies.<\/p>\n

The Oscar Theme Part 2: The Theme Continues<\/h3>\n

The impressive numbers continue. I almost missed this one, but last week The Awl\u2019s Abe Sauer penned<\/a> Why Apple Deserves and Oscar Too,<\/em> which started with this remarkable tidbit;<\/p>\n

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In the 44 films in 2009 that topped the box office for at least one weekend, an Apple logo or device could be seen in at least 18 of them. (That’s almost 41%.) In some, Apple products even eclipsed their human scene partners. This high appearance rate does not include the heap of mass-market films from 2009 that did not own a weekend but also featured Apple product placement.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Sauer has done his homework. He goes on to list a fair number of those movies (you can read the list for yourself here<\/a>) and, if you\u2019ve got the time to spare, (7 minutes and 25 seconds, to be precise) there\u2019s even a Ken Burns-tastic video slideshow of screenshots from movies and TV shows through the years featuring Apple products.\u00a0Sauer adds;<\/p>\n

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\u2026Brandcameo shows that Apple has appeared in 102 of the 302 weekly number one U.S. box office films from 2001 to 2009\u2014more than 33% of them. Apple\u2019s number is actually higher when period and fantasy\/scifi films, in which Apple could not appear, are removed (the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Star Wars prequels 3:10 to Yuma, etc.).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Right then, don\u2019t let it be said that Apple\u2019s brand managers aren\u2019t doing good work.<\/p>\n

The Oscar Theme Part 3: Oscar’s Revenge<\/h3>\n

During the ad break (presumably while Oscar winners were busy phoning their Moms with the good news) the first ever iPad television commercial was broadcast. The ad itself is a bit \u201cmeh,\u201d to be honest; it didn\u2019t light the world on fire and teach us anything we didn\u2019t already know. But that\u2019s OK, because what really matters, I suppose, is that a very large audience not normally exposed to tech\/gadget news saw the iPad for the first time. You can watch the ad on Apple\u2019s website here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m still wondering what Apple was up to<\/a> in that diner back in August last year. At this rate, I think we’ll have to wait for next<\/em> year’s Oscars to find out.<\/p>\n

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Swapping turtleneck for tuxedo, Steve Jobs made a rare public appearance when he took to the red carpet at the Academy Awards last night, spotted first by eagle-eyed social media maven Wayne Sutton who posted to his blog;\u00a0OMG it’s Steve Jobs! I’m the only one yelling at him! #oscars #kodakredcarpet Sutton doesn\u2019t mention whether his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-404566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=404566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404566\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=404566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=404566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=404566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}