This post was submitted by John "Jolly" Bavoso

Mornings suck. So every morning TNG brings you a fun video to help ease the pain.

It’s like they tell you on the Food Network: if you want your kids to eat their vegetables, you have to sneak them into something delicious. Like spinach in your mac n’ cheese, the same philosophy can be applied to images of life and poverty in developing countries (stay with me here): find a way to inject them into a video which is appealing to audiences for other reasons in order to make these serious snippets more palatable.

I’m not sure if that was at all the intent of South African filmmaker Neill Blomkamp, the writer and director behind the upcoming Peter Jackson-produced project, District 9, in 2007 when he made his awesomely special effects-laden 80 seconds-long faux commercial entitled Tetra Vaal, but that’s what he accomplished, at least to me. He offers a tour of some of Johannesburg’s more developing areas, all the while showing off some amazing digital technique to create a robot that’s like the lovechild of Robocop and the bunny monster from Donnie Darko. It’s kind of refreshing to see amazing special effects outside of a totally superficial summer blockbuster. Even if conciousness-raising wasn’t his intent, the artwork is awesome, and the fact that we get to see some otherwise overlooked communities at the same time can still be viewed as a bonus.

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