Drawing of Spikey

Since installing the Brushes application I can't stop playing around with it, sketching random things. It's a super simple program that lets you paint with your fingers on the iPhone. But it just got better as I discovered you can use the free Brushes viewer that tracks every single stroke of your painting so you convert it into a movie. Here's the time lapse of my first effort, Spikey the cactus.



Have a look at the finished painting.

Droga5 goodness

I like this Puma spot from Droga5. It's super fresh and a lot of fun to watch.

Barclays Waterslide Competition

You might have seen BBH's waterslide ad for Barclays Bank. The digital counterpart to this is a youtube film competition to remake this ad. Friends of mine had a go their entry's called the Body waterslide, it's quite charming. If you agree give them your vote, they'd love to win the price – a world waterslide tour.



Looking through the entries there's another one that I find nice, the 8BIT waterslide version.

Another lunch tale

A path never walked upon is not a path.

It is by human definition an undiscovered place out in the open. To be exact, it is to be found in a far away land, the backyard of the galaxy, in the Chihuahuan desert. The only mention of this untrodden path, besides in this story, might be a blank space on some forgotten map. Yet an uncompleted map, made by a careless discoverer that hurried through the sands claiming left and right to be identical. But little did he know what he missed out on. Rooted to the ground vegetated a little fella, a goody-good and devoted peyote cactus.

Spikey, as he likes to call himself due to lack of imagination, has only one single purpose in life, to guard the path that is never walked upon. From the the first he shoot through the soil he immediately began to watching the path very carefully. Whether he knew who assigned him to guard this wonderful place of nothingness we dare not guess. You see, Spikey pierced his lips when he tried to speak his first words back in his green childhood. Ever since, he remained silent, yet always proud of his mission.

With every rain, which came achingly seldom, he grew taller and saw more of the path. His responsibility grew with every inch of his body and it was just a matter of time, he imagined, until he'll spot the first intruder of his habitat. In the the meantime – only when no one was around, which happened rather frequently – Spikey used his favourite 39th thorn to inject his own vegan mind with a tiny bit of his own poison, mescaline. Such a moment is about to happen as we speak and it just might be the most exciting and maybe last day in Spikey's life…

vision's clouded. no wind, yet dangling slightly back and forth. the one reoccurring thought of the peyote cactus comes back again. free, free from the ground, walking loose on the earth, abandoning the path. what an idea, sacrilege! discover everything. leave no blank spaces on any maps, and free all those creatures who guard them. even the rabbit. what rabbit? the one rabbit. spikey shakes away the dizziness and sees the rabbit. it's eyes are filled with madness. the rabbit's undignifying the unwalked path. running towards him, tossing the feet high up in the air. think quicker, what to do? thorns. adjust them in the rabbits direction, en garde! spikey cries out just before the rodent rams the guardian of the place. separated from the ground and the roots the cactus whirls into the air, glancing at the rabbit waiting at the same spot on the ground. spikey lands on the rabbit. the loudest silence since your mom walked in on you. precisely 1982 thorns are rammed into the rabbits back, his eyes now glowing green, the mescaline kicks in. stuck to the rabbit. tears run down spikey's dry body, and a last glance on the path…

Read the first lunch tale here.

Friday 13th

Who says it's a day of bad luck? Today's good. An hour ago we got the good news that the agency just won the big pitch we've been working on. But it's our last day at the Bank for now, they've asked us to stay on but we de-freelanced our diaries for the next two weeks to get a move on with our book and to see people. We're excited about seeing Mareka & Kim at BBH & Graham Fink (it was canceled yesterday). Also the preordered Resident Evil 5 is waiting at home for a relaxed evening of gaming horror. The first bottle was opened at 3 o'clock to celebrate the new client. We've got tickets for one of Michael Jackson gigs. And the envelope with our entry for the Cannes Young Lions print competition should have arrived at the guardian by now. Here's the poster we've submitted to answer the brief. Knock on wood.

Let the games begin

Time for another public service announcement. Like last year the Newspaper Society is searching for the next top young creative team on the 27th of march in the London Art House. It will be judged by Al Young from St.Luke's and it's free to enter. We're definitely on board as we had a great (but stressful) time there and learned a great deal. Conditions of entry are:
Conditions of entry:

(1) You must be in a team of two

(2) You must have 3 years or less agency experience

(3) You must be free to also compete in the Best Yet competition being held in London 7-8 May (expenses covered)

Get in touch with Angelina McGaw on angelina_mcgaw@newspapersoc.org.uk or 020 7632 7446. Last year they were oversubscribed so get a move on if you'd like to compete. We're very much looking forward to it.

Rodchenko & Popova

The Tate Modern is hosting a marvelous exhibition of the Constructivism movement that emerged in the Soviet Union. Rodchenko and the rest of the Constructivism gang compared the artist to an engineer – someone who arranges different materials to make something that fulfills a purpose. They applied their ideas to many medias and contributed to graphic design, architecture, clothing design and advertising. It's pretty amazing to see what they got away with working for the Bolshevik government.

As this movement rejected art for art's sake I'd like to imagine that this was the beginning of artist-designers in a modern sense. People who were using art in order to improve everyday life in practical aspects. For me Alexander Rodchenko seems like the first Art Director ever, he even designed lots of ads that Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Russian poet wrote copy for. It's well worth well checking out.

The Bank

We started another freelance gig today at an agency called The Bank. It's not finance but integrated advertising. One of the sweet things they did was to remake La Dolce Vita for Peroni.
They did some sweet stuff for Peroni, remaking La Dolce Vita. We'll be there for a couple of days, maybe longer helping out on a pitch. Fun and lots of work so far.

Young Lions 2009

Like in the last couple of years Cannes is having an international competition to determine the best young creative teams (under 28 years old) in the world. Last year didn't go too well for the UK teams. In all three creative categories Film, Print and Cyber no pivotal achievements were made. How did they choose the teams to go to France and compete under the UK flag you might ask? In 2008 young teams submitted three pieces of work according to the category. This time the UK Young Lions competition is held by the guardian. Rather than submitting work they've set briefs that resemble the real competition in Cannes. Meaning the clients are charity and you just produce one answer to it and craft it. I like that, it's way more transparent and might make for a more equitable choice of competitors.

Check out the website for this competition. The brief for Cyber and Print is on Christian Aid and the issue of HIV in third world countries. The deadline is pretty close, it's the 6th of March, this Friday. We're working on a print entry ourselves. Check the guidelines if you're eligible to enter. It'll be great if the UK could make an impact this year. Get started.

So what's the brief for the film category, being the most prestigious of them? There's none. The guardian decided to ditch the participation in film for this year instead opting for the media category which isn't for creatives really. Rather disappointing, right?