Cut & Paste

On Saturday I made my way to Elephant & Castle to attend this years Cut & Paste. It's a digital design tournament with three categories, 2d, 3d and motion design. There are several rounds and the competitors have a slot of 20 minutes to design something that fits the given theme. The briefs they get were quite open like a record sleeve that's 'tongue in cheek', or a billboard about 'tough love'. It's interesting that the design process, which normally is quite intimate and happens behind closed doors, is shown so transparent to everyone.

It's good fun to have some beers and watch the designers on the stage sweating away trying to rock the show in this ridiculously short time frame with a genius idea. The crowd is cheering for their favourite competitor while the DJ plays a matching tune – it's designers performing on stage like rock stars, a great concept.

Visiting creative orchestra

Earlier this week we traveled to visit a new agency here in London called creative orchestra. Several people were chatting about this place in the first few weeks since they opened shop and this made us quite curious. Their office is hidden away in north Islington although full with nice stuff and a bunch of young people, in fact that's what this place is about: Young creative talent. Chris & Victoria, the founders and creative directors, want to assemble a force of 25 juniors from different creative disciplines and offer their services to clients on a project basis and to advertising agencies as an independent creative department. For the talent it means a different way of compensation, the more you accomplish the more you earn.

They have a few briefs floating around the place for interesting brands and seem to be a hive of busy idea bees as they also encourage the youngsters to realize their own ideas and develop original intellectual property. The place seems to have a a good vibe about it, fun is an integral part of their creative process. They pulled off a couple of stunts to introduce themselves to the industry, send aging cream to Mother, wrote a April's fool article on campaign and held a creative session for a day on the circle line.

They do enjoy being called the new Mother by others and had some positive comments from other rock star agencies like Anomaly. We'd say it's a teenage pregnancy so far, we'll have to give them the nine months to see how it works out with the motherhood. We salute their fresh approach which is rather relevant to us and many other young creatives out there. We're curious where it goes and the work to come out of creative orchestra. Maybe we'll even get to contribute.

Wanted Ads retrospective

Friday was the day of the clash of the creative teams. Hosted by the newspaper society in the London Art House the Young team of the Year competition attracted 22 junior teams for a one day brief. It was set by JWT, the client being HSBC and a new product called World Selection. It was all about using local media like newspapers, local websites and events to bring the message across. The day went pretty well, we had a room to ourselves and were way less stressed than last year, which helped a great deal concentrating on the task.

After 5 hours of work we presented our idea to a panel of judges (we had Al Young, Paul Belford and an account manager from JWT on ours), which went pretty alright. Unlike last time we were rather happy with our idea and this competition seemed very close.

Lots of excitement and anticipation before the announcement of the results kept everyone nervous. We knew half of the teams participating and had a great time catching up and chatting during the waiting period and afterwards in the pub.

Joe and Alex spanked it with their winning idea and the runners up were Enrique and Borja, the same guys from last year. A job well done lads. This year the Newspaper Society are doing things a little differently and will be putting up all the work from the day online so the public can have their say. That's going to be really interesting as we didn't get a chance to see the other entries. So lets wait and see what London's junior talent had to offer. Also, there was lots of filming on the day so watch this space and we'll keep you posted about a rumored viral that will be circulating soon. Big thanks to the newspaper society for making all this work, it was a fun and competitive day. Finally a good luck to the boys for the European competition and hopefully on to Cannes from there.

Knock some sense into them

Today Obama rolls into London to meet Mr.Brown – the City is expected to go nuts with demonstrations due to the G20 summit tomorrow. A lot of activists and charities are are on their toes trying to reach those politicians. Friends of ours are too, for Save the Children.



Take a few seconds, they don't want any money but you to sign the petition, it's a great cause.

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?

Erik & Philippe interview

I'm a bit late on this, but ihaveanidea.org published their interview with Erik and Philippe here. I admire their optimism towards the industry, these guys love what they do. If you want to be a great creative, it can be simple, it is all about hard work and staying yourself, staying unique. Many times this had been said, but it's good to hear it again. I'm off to town now, we're meeting at NABS today to do some work and contact people.

A Day in the Life of Abbey Road

A simple idea makes a great music video. I have yet to visit that place.

David B

The mighty David 'DeathSpin' Buonaduidi welcomed us yesterday in his white Karmahouse for a chat about our book. We heard that they were not particularly looking for teams but always keens on seeing them. I was glad that Dave recognized me from back then when I've met him at the Under the Influence talk organized by Iris.

The meeting was rather positive as Dave was precise and to the point with his opinions on our work. Stuff like Paperchase and TfL he found nice, but not in the best way. He was more keen on our Greenpeace, Ryanair and the direction J2O was heading. We wanted to see Karmarama for some time now and were happy to finally done so. We left our contacts and entered his freelance radar, a good thing we think. Back to work now. Jai is helping his mum, she's a singer, and has a concert today. She does all the time but rarely it is in London. On my end I decided to look into a bunch of strategies and write a list of new ones. We're getting ready to continue our visits to creatives who wave their arms. Who's next?

Brainsnacks

The weekend was great, Pink Floyd music, snow in hamburg, foreign movies, fish, crazy americans and friends. Now catching up with Mad Men and mulling over the notes from todays bookcrit, we saw another creative director. More about this tomorrow.

Dave Trott

Yesterday we went to see Dave Trott, creative director at CST. We knew it would be interesting to talk to him and show him our work – and it t was a brilliant session indeed. Dave certainly knows how to be a brand himself. He compares getting a job to selling a product – of course he's right, we are the most important product we'll ever sell. It's about researching the market (creative directors) and looking into the product (the creative team) and matching those two together. We like the fact that the whole topic was more how to get the job rather than the work. In fact, we spend two hours with Dave, and he didn't even look at our book.

There were lots of nuggets we took away from this meeting, lessons you won't find on his blog. A lot to take in, and a great deal to talk about. Perfect to kick the January blues in the ass and rock on. Thanks Dave.

Trophy heads

One of our readers, Alfred, just pointed out this Superbowl ad.



Making us happy to see that there are other people out there thinking about what's on the other side of a trophy head. Watch Jai the horseman, as we shot it on placement at W+K London. We really should have made it much shorter, right?

All white

London's crumbling under a white cover, no buses, tube stations are closed and lots of snowball fights are taking place on the streets. When I arrived after a 2 hour long journey at the agency it seems half empty. It was fun walking through the snow not trying to slip away and cover myself with the coffee I was carrying. The real tricky part will be getting home. And once this is accomplished there will be time to watch yesterdays superbowl ads. That is if I make it through the public transport chaos. It is quite impressive how vulnerable this city is to such weather.

Back to AR

Stubble Jai concepting away while evil Wal planning his daily piano assault. We're back to Agency Republic for a few days to work on some stuff.

Comments

We’re following Scamps example and switching to comment moderation. Now whenever a comment is left it will end up in our inbox waiting for approval. Restrictive? Maybe, but it’s our blog and we don’t like the way some people are abusing the comment function. Your opinions are always welcome as long as they stay constructive and don’t insult anyone.

Cheers.

Portfolioing

Bookwork rules our daily schedules nowadays and it's big fun. Even more after our first bookcrit this year with WCRS on Friday. We saw Oli and Alex, a team who helped us a great deal. We have a few new pieces and they seemed to liked them and wanted more, so we give them more.

This week starts off with seeing Rory at The Talent Business and an integrated agency about potential freelance work tomorrow. We're charged.

Erik & Philippe

You know ihaveanidea.org right? They brought us things like Portfolio night and lots of great articles. Continuing the awesomeness they are going to get Erik Vervroegen (former ECD of TBWA/Paris) and Philippe Meunier (co-founder of Sid Lee) in front of a camera for ihaveanidea's first video interview.

O' course they are smart boys and girls and have thought of lots of clever and interesting questions in order to squeeze some advertising wisdom out of those two stars. However they are still giving everyone a chance to quiz these masters – especially as most of the readers of ihaveanidea are North Americans, we shall see what London's creative crowd is curious about. Send your questions to Brett (brett@ihaveanidea.org subject: Erik & Philippe) or leave a comment before Monday the 26th of January. State your name and location if you wanna be credited in the video.

Here are some of my favourite print ads done under Erik V.

Smile Yasar

There's war in Gaza. And I think there's not much we can do about it. But if there's one thing we could change and make the life of one person better in this difficult time – with a single comment, should we not try? Have a go and http://makeyasersmile.blogspot.com

Creative Sensei

It seems like young creatives cannot afford to be picky about their first job nowadays. Yet we shall all have ideas where we'd like to work – and there are a lot of ways how to make that choice. I imagine many a creative is attracted by the glamorous name and the reputation of an ad shop and chooses the place they apply to by the name above the door. So were we. When we started out, we admired the coolest ones, always checking Campaign's new business charts, the award annuals and of course the recent work.

After some placements you realize that there's much more to it. Now there is one main criteria we're looking for in order judge whether a place is for us or not: a creative (director, or team) we can learn from. I think that's the critical point when you start out in this business, to find someone who can act as a mentor and help you moulding your potential and make you a better advertiser. A creative whose opinion you can absolutely trust and seek out if needed. Not someone who solves your problems, but rather helps to find the solution yourself. Finding such a person is not as easy as it seems and once you find that mentor, showing them enthusiasm and hunger is the real challenge.

When we look at an agency, we do not care about the name above the door. It is a only an indicator for where the great people are. We care more about the one person that can teach us to reach the next level – a creative sensei. Scamp and Dave Trott are great examples for this breed of advertiser. We're interested in your thoughts. Do you know more creatives like that? Or have you found your sensei already?

Back to business

After the the cold winter hibernation we warmed up and put together our plan of action for the next weeks. We're excited. The first part is to bring the ideas we gathered over the holiday season to life and on paper. We can't wait to share them with people.

Happy 2009!

Happy new year to all our readers – we hope everyone's celebrating this one properly, we certainly are. Jai Wal will be back next week when we're together again in London. So long, fill the first days of this year with fun and happiness.

Winter redesign

To celebrate the cold times ahead we imported some fine Scandinavian pixel snow and built two paper hat snowmen for our Creative in London backyard above. They might keep us company until the spring sun melts them away.

James & James hired

Sweet, our good friends James and James just got hired yesterday on their first advertising job. We've been sharing experience with those guys for ages, and after two year of placements they made it. So here's a happy happy from us – do well guys, we're sure you will.

We'll try to catch up that and get ourselves a job in the new year as well :)

O2 banner game

This week we're off at Agency Republic. And today a banner game we came up with and saw through is online on msn.co.uk. If you'd like to have a look, go on the website, click on the MPU and have a play. We don't think it's running for too long but if we'll get our hands on the files we'll upload it somewhere ourselves.

me me

Seb has tagged us with a meme. A what? Exactly. Even if we don't really know what it stands for it's a bit of fun. Here are the rules as we inherited from mister Seb:

* Mention the rules on your blog.
* Tell six quirky yet boring, unspectacular details about yourself.
* Tag six other
* Go to each person’s blog and let them know they are tagged.

We think being a team makes it exactly 50% easier and we decided to split it up to three quirky & boring details each.

Jai says

1. I often find myself listening to tracks on my iTunes while singing to a completely different song in my head.

2. Lately I’ve been feeling five again. That’s the effect bottomless orange squash has on me.

3. I always challenge the sun to a staring contest. I’ve yet to win one.

Wal says

4. I cannot jump with my right foot, an odd thing that stopped my NBA career in the early tracks.

5. If I get too drunk I have to close one eye in order to see straight.

6. My sun quirk is that I have to sneeze multiple times if I look into the sun for a second too long.

We're tagging Matt, Simon, Ferris, Sal, Gordon and Jade&Lucy

End of Movember

Work

Constant bannering at our freelance gig paid off, after 100+ ideas for all sizes of banners we are breaking out of 300x250. We got a brief yesterday for something pretty cool. The idea is done - now we need to bring it to life for tomorrow's presentation and cross our fingers that it will make it. Did I mention that we're excited?

O2 days

Last week we were one of three teams doing the quarterly O2 concepting days of Agency Republic. That's three days outside the agency, away from daily business and 10+ briefs for O2. It was quite exhausting, but very good fun, as we had to come up with lots of stuff in a very short time. By the end of the three days we had a huge pile of work, all of it has been narrowed down and some of the ideas have already been sold to the client today. Good.

Anders Gustavsson is the creative director in charge of O2 and he's also the one who we worked with for those three days. He's been with AR for a couple of months now, having recently moved from FarFar, a pretty amazing Swedish digital agency which he founded with a couple of friends back in 2000. We're pretty glad we get to work with him – he's a brilliant guy and we are learning a lot from him. Very Good.

Flu360

An evil cold kidnapped me lately and forced me to stay out of all kinds of social activities this weekend. Which leaves me glued to the couch under a blanket, with tasty Russian style chicken soup on the hob and the good ol' Xbox 360. My Gamertag is 'Verdure' – if anyone else should be on Live. Back to recovery, I need to get better for Monday.

Quite a view

Although a bit far out, Battersea looks rather nice when the sun sinks down. Today we also discovered the agency's rooftop where we took the above snap. Looks like we'll be enjoying those sunsets for another week.

Please Feed the Animals

Times are rough, the economy's bad. First hand experienced by a senior copywriter from across the pond. Eric lost his job a few weeks ago, and started a blog for newly unemployed advertising people - Please Feed the Animals. I think it's a good read as it's not that different from getting your first job in advertising. Every little helps, right?

300

The sun is shining. Bob's voice is flowing from the agencys' sound system. Even though he just shot the sherriff he's telling me not to worry. And I'm not, everything's gonna be alright. We're here for another week. Loaded with work, we made a concept that we're really happy with and the clients' signed it off, production is going to be great fun.

This is post number 300 on Creative in London. Thanks for reading.

Burn After Reading

I rarely write about movies, even I devour legions of them in my spare time. I enjoyed 'Burn After Reading' on the big screen yesterday and it was grande. I do like all other Coen Brothers' movies, so I was prepared not to be prepared. I must admit that my flatmates & neighbours who came along, were either unimpressed, bored or amused. So there's no definite verdict from the group. Yet I think it is a brilliant film. The acting is great, there is a lot of tacky stuff that is used really well, and the film charms with lots of subtle details - definitely the best part of the movie. I am chuckling all morning thinking back of some scenes.

Seriously, go watch it. The title will make perfect sense afterwards.

Back to Back

From the back of my mind to the back of my notebook. Random sketch in between things.

Photorealistic Photoshop

Great ad. Could we get this as a skin for our favourite software?
From here.

Bad Taste

Speaking of Rock Stars. Last week was pretty though, we got lots of stuff done so the weekend was crying out for some fun times. And fun times we had. Friday night was the Bad Taste House party at Wal's flat, everyone dressed his or her worst and rocked out. What a great end for a hectic week, splendid!

Freelance Republic

Yesterday we landed ourselves a short notice freelance gig which started this morning at Agency Republic, a digital agency in Battersea. We'll be here for a week or two to work on various things. We're done with our first brief, things are off to the client. The next deadline is tomorrow lunch time, where after we'll get another brief. No rest for the wicked as Gav, AR's creative director says. It's our first creative freelance gig and we like it.

Change

This morning on Twitter: "it was a bit like waking up and finding that it had snowed."

Saatchi Gallery

I made my way to Sloane Square last week to visit the new Saatchi Gallery in the Duke of York's HQ. I've never been to one of their galleries and was quite curious what I will find in this place which 'aims to provide an innovative forum for contemporary art, presenting work by largely unseen young artists or by established international artists whose work has been rarely or never exhibited in the UK'. The exhibition they have running to open this new venue is The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art.

For me contemporary art is a big gamble, most of the time there is a lot of junk with a few sweet pieces in between. Not this time. I was blown away by the fact that I liked most of the stuff in there. It's the kind of stuff I really dig. Give it a try, you can't go wrong, it's free, and it has just the right size, you won't get bored in there. Some of my favourite shots below.