you want to know what my pet peeve is? When companies, that have a shitload of money but exploit a cultural icon. This time it is the Bladerunner movie. I fucking loved this movie. Still love it for that matter. But here is where things start to sour.
Apparently Warner Brothers contracted ADD Marketing (http://www.addmarketing.com/) to set up this "Bladerunner Contest" - http://bladerunnercontest.com/
ADD sent me an email to see if I would be interested in submitting something for the contest. They also encouraged me to encourage other artist friends to submit work. The premises of the contest is that you submit art, video, fashion, music, writings etc, that was influenced by the movie Bladerunner. Good idea, right? Bladerunner is chocked full of imagery, plots, subplots, ideas, and effects that would get even the most dull of minds churning. For me it was the architecture of the movie. Part of the movie was filmed in the Bradbury Building, which is located at 302 South Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles. It is a phenomenal building. Take a look at these pictures of the interior of the building. Its great, right?
So i had the idea that I would do a few pieces based on the Bladerunner architecture. It was going to be great. I had it all worked out in my head.
Then came the reason that this whole thing sucks. I read the
contest rules. This is the link at the bottom of the website. When you click on the link the rules pop up. But the rules are in a shockwave format, so you cant select the text, then paste it into a program were you can enlarge it enough to read it. No, instead they put a scroll box, where you can only read about 10 lines at a time, so you have to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll to get through this whole thing. You know what the rules basically say? Basically it says 'fuck you. we want you to do shit for us, and in return we get to own it, we get to use it for anything,and in return we will give you a framed bladerunner poster, and no, you dont get any vaseline. fuck you very much'.
Well, i decided to take some screen shots of the rules, and paste them in the same order that they appear on the website. Below is the result of my little project. In the middle is the text - the same as it appears on their website. I highlighted the text that I had a comment about, and then used my 'bullshit interpreter' to list what it really means on the left and right side of the text.
This is a low blow to all artists out there. Do people actually fall for this shit? Companies like this need to learn to stop fucking artists. We are talking about Warner Brothers for god-sake. It's not like they are broke. Would it kill them to actually compensate the artists who they use work from? I never ask for a hand out, but if i work several dozen hours on a work of art, I dont think that a framed poster is proper compensation. (note: framed poster is one of the runner up prizes in this contest)
Please repost, and share with anybody that cares to read it. I know this thing happens all of the time, but this is one of the most brazen attempts to fuck artists out of their creative works without any compensation.
images of Bradbury Building borrowed from:
http://media.bladezone.com/contents/film/production/Linda-DeScenna/index.html
http://www.devilsrobot.com/photoblog/?showimage=101
http://static.flickr.com/58/212028809_e314feac1e_o.jpg
