Industrial Design

Recycling the Sound of Music

By Delphine Hirasuna | December 14, 2012September 4, 2014

The village of Catuera in Paraguay is literally built on a garbage dump that grows by more than 1,500 tons of solid waste each day. The people, including children, who live around this trash heap survive by sorting and recycling the garbage.

Several years ago, Favio Chavez, an ecological technician who worked at the landfill, befriended the poor scavenger families and became acutely aware that the children who worked on the trash pile yearned for something uplifting in their lives. He decided to share his love of playing music by teaching the children to play instruments. At first, Chavez used his own musical instruments to teach them, but so many children wanted to learn that he tried cobbling violins and cellos out of oil cans, jars, scrap wood, forks and other junk to give them something to play, After about four years of experimenting, Chavez and his team began discovering which materials created the best sound. The result is a youth orchestra, now 30 members strong, that produces the sweetest sounds from their recycled instruments. Recently their story has been turned into a documentary, directed by Graham Townsley. It’s an inspiration on many levels.

Advertising

Motel 6 Road Trip Through Time

By Delphine Hirasuna | April 26, 2012September 4, 2014

Motel 6 chose an interesting way to tell consumers that they’ve been around for a half century. They “time traveled” both the station wagon and the family of four inside through the decades by morphing them into the latest styles. For those who are baffled about how Motel 6 got its name, here’s the story. The motel chain was founded in 1962 by two building contractors in Santa Barbara, California, who figured out how to offer bargain rates by calculating out the cost of land, construction and ongoing maintenance. By cutting out any frills, they decided they could offer rooms at $6 a night and still make a profit – hence, the name Motel 6. Of course, inflation and other factors have caused room rates to go up multifold over the past 50 years, but relative to other hotels, it is still considered affordable to penny-pinching families.

This commercial was made by Dallas ad agency, The Richards Group, which has been running Motel 6 ad campaigns since the 1980s. They were the ones who came up with Motel 6’s famous tagline “We’ll leave the light on for you.” The Richards Group teamed with the production firm King and Country (K&C), which made the 30-second spot from start to finish – production, direction, editorial, animation and VFX – completely inhouse. Rick Gledhill directed for K&C.