Engadget: Sam Mendes shooting Apple ads, video chat to be featured

@stand: It looks like ViFlaten killed her Twitter account (even though it's been RT'ed about a billion times now).

@vandil: The director has his people line up the auditions from the usual sources, the only reason they tie that to video chat is that it was reported elsewhere that Sam Mendes was working on a video chat commercial. This is just (weakly) confirming that information.

Those people aren't fake. According to Mike Evangelist, a former director of product marketing, Apple actually calls on employees to submit real photos and home movies (or at least, they used to).

You can read about it here:

http://writersblocklive.com/the-wizard-of-pods-2006-02#more-143

"Next came the task of finding suitable sample material. My team was given the task of locating locate movies, photos and music to be used when he created his sample DVD on stage. Most companies would just choose some clipart or hire a video producer to make some simulated ‘home movies’. Steve prefers real people’s photos and home movies. He wanted material that looked great, yet did not seem impossible for an average person to achieve. We called on everyone we knew at Apple to submit their best home movies and snapshots. Before long we had an amazing collection of fun, cool and heartwarming videos and photos. My team picked the best and confidently presented them to Steve. True to his reputation as a perfectionist, he hated most of them. We repeated that process several times before he was satisfied. At the time I thought he was being unreasonable; but I ultimately had to admit the material we ended up with was much better than we had begun with."

* On a side note:
ATT charged my son $1016 for the 61MB he used to stream live video from Mexico. I thought he was on Wi-Fi! They did backdate a 100Mb plan for $100 though. Whew!

it could be an excited f***ing, you know...