Drake Doremus seems to like being busy. The director of last year's Sundance sensation "Like Crazy" (which we think deserved to do better than it did), has not only wrapped on his next film (more on that in a moment), but he's also behind the camera for a campaign for Intel and Toshiba that has a couple interesting leads helping him out.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Topher Grace will feature in "The Beauty Inside," a series of shorts that follow Alex (voiced by Grace), a young man who wakes up each day with a different appearance. The trick here is that Toshiba and Intel are using social media to allow ordinary folks to audition to play the role Alex — since he can be anybody — with a chance to feature in an episode of the campaign or, less excitingly, on the official Facebook page timeline. It's an interesting use of social media we suppose, and the trailer for the project below has some of the same melancholy notes of "Like Crazy" so we'll see how this plays out……holy shit, was that Matthew Gray Gubler from "Criminal Minds" in there?
Anyway, you can start seeing the results when the first episode airs online on August 16th at 3 p.m. Each week a new episode will drop until the whole thing wraps up on September 20th, and we'll see how a Toshiba Portege Ultrabook can solve a broken heart. And as we mentioned, there is still more on the horizon for Doremus, who has a new film in post-production that stars Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Amy Ryan, Kyle MacLachlan and Alexandra Whitworth and details an inappropriate relationship between a student and teacher. No word on when it will appear — it wasn't in the first wave of TIFF titles — but we wouldn't be suprised if it held out to Sundance.
In the meantime, check out Doremus talking about the Intel/Toshiba project below along with a trailer and decide if you want to get involved. [Mashable via The Film Stage]
I dunno, I feel like "Like Crazy" did about as well as it deserved. I was super pumped for that movie after I saw the trailer, and I thought the movie was pretty mediocre. It was good. Better than average in a technical way, but it didn't reach an interesting pitch. It seemed like your typical Sundance indie: small, personal… and maybe a little inert.