The Force of Sound is a new documentary that takes a behind-the-scenes look at the sounds of the movie Star Wars and how they were created.

What would the Star Wars movie franchise be without the iconic John Williams score, or the screaming din of warring star craft and their laser guns? Sound may not be a top-of-mind element that you notice when watching the Star Wars movies, but how it combines with the arresting visuals to spike and stir the imagination of the viewer is undeniable.

Here is the full, 26-minute long ABC film, The Force of Sound:

“One of the big reasons I wanted to explore sound design is that, frankly, I think it’s under-appreciated by the general public,” ABC News correspondent Clayton Sandell tells StarWars.com. “I loved learning from Matthew Wood and Ren Klyce about how sound can convey feelings and emotions that even the visuals can’t. Sound alone can make a scene feel bigger than it is, or create a very intimate environment. Good sound, [visual effects innovator] John Knoll told me, adds a richness and believability to visual effects and help convince your brain that what you’re seeing is real. So we really wanted to pull the curtain back on the process and show Star Wars fans how it’s done.”

Previously: 5 Netflix documentaries to watch – Cherryflava

If you’re a James Bond fan, or enjoy the Jason Bourne & Mission Impossible movies then David Adjaye’s brand new New York City-based experiential museum of espionage and spying, called Skyscape, will most certainly be your vibe.

Located on the first three levels of a building in Midtown Manhattan, occupying an area of 5,574m2, the attraction is part museum and part interactive centre, which showcases the fascinating world of espionage, exhibited in the form of stories, tools and characters. Visitors can also participate in challenges that range from surveillance skills to special ops training. via

Regular readers of this site will know that we are massive fans of experiential futures and immersive experiences that challenge the mind to reframe reality in new and creative ways.

What we really like about the idea of Spyscape is that it presents itself as a museum of the future in which a reimagining of surveillance and privacy is encouraged. If we can imagine how life must have been in the past in a dedicated museum, the same must be true as well in our collective effort to visualise a preferred future too.

Spyscape offers a multi-sensory interactive experience where visitors can pretend to be spies. The adventure starts on arrival, when each is presented with an Identity Band​ that is used to track their journey with electromagnetic fields. via

If you want to encourage people to really picture themselves in the future – give them a believable set to walk around in and touch artefacts from a time yet to come.

For decades it was safe to say that ‘nobody does marketing…better than Coke does marketing.’

In 2018 however – you’d be met with a blank stare if you had to utter such nonsense in a public place.

Coca Cola have seen their ranking as the world’s best brand tumble over the past decade, as teenagers have turned their attention away from slurping sugary drinks, while physically talking to each other in-person – to rather just connecting and talking nonsense on a virtual interface instead. All the usual digital brand suspects (that we all know and love so very much) have literally kicked Coke to the brand ranking sidewalk.

Of course the global fear of sugar and the lethargic, anti-social behaviour that it encourages hasn’t exactly helped Coke’s fortunes either.

Fuelled by a strict Vegan-diet and copious dollops of angst, thanks to the constant threat of the triumphant return of Paris Hilton, many anti-Coke campaigners have labeled ‘sugar the new tobacco’, which may just have made sipping on an ice cold Coca Cola on a hot summer’s day as cool as the iconic image of James Dean smoking a cigarette.

This trend hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Harvard MBA marketers at Coke – who have now sprung upon this caramel-flavoured opportunity to sell the idea of drinking a Diet Coke…as an act of defiance.

Leading up to Super Bowl LII – Diet Coke have launched their ‘Because I can’ campaign – featuring Gillian Jacobs and others.

There’s absolutely no attempt to try convince anyone that drinking a Diet Coke can in anyway be associated with a long, healthy life. Rather – the offer is just made that Coke tastes great…so if you feel like drinking one – just do it already.

We do however have an issue with Coke claiming that ‘a feisty Cherry isn’t the kind of Cherry that you bring home to your Mom.’ What on earth are they saying here?

Weirdly, we like this new ‘give a damn’ attitude. So many brands try so hard to be holier-than-though all of the time, so it’s refreshing to see Coke throw caution to the wind for a change.

Yes sugar (and all of it’s artificial substitutes) is really bad for you, but so is staring at your cellphone for 5 hours a day.

Now that 2018 is well underway and the long. lazy holiday is all but forgotten, it’s back to business and, for most senior management anyways, a deep-dive into the consumer trends, scenarios and soothsayer-like ‘predictions’* for the year ahead.

But what practical value does this information really have?

Before we get into the answer to that question, it is useful to understand something fundamental about all business that many business people all too easily forget.

No company is an island.

Every single organisation operates within a larger contextual environment, which is constantly shifting and changing on multiple dimensions. In South Africa, the local contextual environment shifts on its head constantly; in particular our political, economic and social landscape is extremely fluid and volatile and we are unfortunately particularly susceptible to changes in the broader regional and international environments too (just think of how volatile our local currency is to the mood swings of global traders). Operating a business and offering a stable value proposition into this ever-changing landscape is treacherous for the uninformed.

And it is for this reason then, that organisations that practice an ongoing scanning of the changes in the environmental context are better prepared and more ready to shift themselves into the opportunities that present themselves as a result  of this understanding.

I would argue even further to say that a lack of this kind of proper foresight practice in a business that operates in South Africa in 2018 is downright irresponsible and reckless. To add to this, not all information that this foresight practice is based on is of equal worth. Much of it is produced more for entertainment value than as structured intelligence that should be taken seriously, so be very careful what trends and ‘predictions’ you take to heart.

But as strategies are finalised and budgets are signed off, the value of having a comprehensive understanding of context, and then the ongoing spotting of early changes to that context throughout 2018, is very useful for the effective execution of your plans to achieve the results you were hoping for.

As the speed of change accelerates into the future, having a pedantic, company-wide focus on context will certainly be an investment well made.

World trade is complex by nature, so it is not always that easy to visualise what the numbers really look like.

Here however is a very useful interactive graphic of the world’s $15 trillion worth of global trade. Each dot in this graphic is worth $100 million of exports.

Here’s what South Africa looks like from a trade density perspective as well as who our major trading partners are. You’ll note that besides Zimbabwe, we generally ignore the rest of SSA.

What is the most notable for us, is if you compare South America with Africa – you can clearly see how equally active most South American countries are when it come to trade; in comparison to the very unequal distribution of trade in Africa. Projects like Operation Phakisa are meant to be addressing this imbalance, but there is clearly still a long way to go.

Clearly there are lots of challenges when it comes to economic complexity, as well as remarkable opportunities if the region can just get some kind of co-operation going.

In this first-of-its-kind conversation, Mark and Jeff Bezos have a fireside chat and discuss their early influences, habits for success, and predictions for the future.

Topics that are covered include long-term thinking, space travel, sustainability and the future of humanity.

We live in a modern, networked world where companies are now more powerful than governments and entrepreneurs can move products and money around the world in the blink of an eye. And yet we still believe in the notion of nation-states, political borders and foreign affairs diplomacy.

Politically our 21st century world is still being run with tools and techniques that originated in the 17th century – and the poor results are clear to see all around us.

What’s missing are new policy tools that can be used in a networked, 21st century world.

Prof Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a book entitled ‘The Chessboard and the Web‘ in which she explored possible solutions to this issue.

In a genuinely globalized world where everyone and everything is connected, the relevance of nation states is coming under scrutiny from above and below. Many people – especially the newly digitally empowered – are less wedded to the idea of a nation state than were their predecessors. Turning to internet-enabled communities, they are seeking out alternative identities, whether animated by faith, ethnicity, language, class or sexuality.

Augmented by social media, the fault lines of identity politics are exerting new pressure on nation states and traditional political parties. Globalization, which at one time played a unifying force, is triggering ever greater localization. via

Here she is discussing the book and her ideas:

What’s clear from her presentation is that the world is lacking in the ability to apply systems thinking to our issues. The old ways of thinking are outdated and frankly the cause of many of our current issues. We need new tools.