— IR A VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL —

UPDATE October 15, 2014: I am pleased to report that, after the release of this news, both the National Bank of Greece and also the audiovisual company creators of video contacted me in order to fix this situation. And we have finally reached an agreement: production company has licensed the use of the original images from Nature by Numbers, and has committed to rebuild the promotional video using my images, with its color adjustments and customized postpro. So finally everything ended well ;-)

Four years ago, when I finished and I shared my animation Nature by Numbers, I never imagined that it would be so successful and eventually had such a repercussion. It is a curious thing happens when you create something: you never know how it will be received by the rest of the people… Sometimes you feel very satisfied and proud of a new project, but it remains completely ignored. And sometimes you think you’ve done something too rare and personal, that will not catch interest at all, and it happens just the opposite. This was the case for NBN, certainly: a video that today has nearly 4 million views on YouTube and a million and a half on Vimeo, which has been linked from many websites and it has brought me many satisfactions and surprises.

The last surprise, not exactly happy, is that someone plagiarized part of it. And I use the word “plagiarism” quite properly, I think. Because is not that they have used images of the animation to create other content (I mean a “copy-paste”, something that has also happened before), but they have re-created completely new scenes “slightly inspired” in my work —read with ironic tone—. And it’s not a video made ​​for a small company in the middle of nowhere, in the other corner of the world. Nope… This is a promotional video for the National Bank of Greece.

Tomorrow I will send a small note to the gentlemen of that financial institution. Especially, to translate to them the originality and professional attitude of the company that manages his advertising account (since I prefer to believe that the bank staff does not know anything about this issue).

By the way, thank you very much to Alexander Selkirk, who put me on the track of this fact, through Twitter.

I leave you with a few screenshots, so you can compare because how knows… maybe it’s only my imagination ;-)

The promotional video, hosted on YouTube was deleted after the publication of this post, although I keep a copy, for posterity, logically ;-)

And here is “Nature by Numbers”, with its original music by a genius, Wim Mertens: