Butterflies

A 40 second intro to a piece of narrative myself, Josh and Ruud wrote for the Art Direction brief.

Illustration...Music....Mash-up

Having a quiet day sat in the house today, getting a bit of artist/illustrator research on for our PC brief. One of the highlights of the day is from Andy Miller at Koma Design. I found his work while looking through some of Love's archives (can't hurt to do as much research about my soon-to-be temporary employers as I can, can it?)

Now, I always like a good bit of music to keep me going while sat around all day, and Aeroplane have been at the top of my 'uni working' playlist for a while, especially their cover CD for Mixmag a few months ago. But I think their talent's shown off even more in their minimix for Annie Mac last Friday...thanks to the joys of Hypem, I found a copy of it for download (not really sure how to embed a track, so here's a link to the blog I found it off)

Aeroplane Minimix 15/5/09

Keep your eyes peeled for YCN entry work I'll be putting on here next week. Results/Commendations out Monday! Peace x

I’d like to thank...

This is a post I debated about how to write without sounding big headed for, ooh, all of 2 minutes, before I thought ‘no, we deserved this, I’m going to tell everyone, and might even stick my tongue out at everyone as well!’.

Ok, maybe I wasn’t thinking exactly that, but I always struggle to tell people about this piece of work without feeling as if my head was growing a slight bit when I mention the competition win. Way back before I’d even started this blog, myself and Josh began work on our entry for the MPA Roses Student Creativity Awards 2009. The brief was set by Harinder at Love, in Manchester (more about them later). The creative process went very smoothly, in fact within a few days of getting the brief we pretty much had our strategy/idea in mind, and then it was just a case of coming up with the best ideas and then art directing them to as high a standard as we could. It felt as if we’d never get there, but earlier this year we managed to get all the niggly bits down and the work sent off.

To be honest I think we’d put the competition out of our heads due to more major work on YCN briefs and dissertation stuff, so it was a shock when someone text me saying congratulations! We’ve got a placement starting at Love in a couple of weeks, so will be blogging a lot more about that soon.

Henry, don’t look at me like that!

No, not a reference to Russell Brand and his infamous run-in with our favourite domestic product with a smiley face, I’m just sick of Hoover now! Gyles always said we’d end up hating the products you have to advertise...and I think he’s definitely onto something. They told us it wasn’t a final major project, but it blatantly was...4 weeks in teams of 4 working on a full campaign with two creative outputs (2 TV, 2 radio, 2x3 48 sheets, 2x1 print, and 2x1 Direct Mail piece). Not complaining about the workload, I’m sure that was quite generous compared to what we could have got, but was still a nice and busy way to end the year.

Working with Josh, Ruud and Brooke, we got off to a slow start but then managed to get cracking and it all came out very well. Overall we got a 1st, so cannot complain about that at all! Below are some pieces from both campaigns.

Colour my life with the chaos of trouble

It wasn't just advertising we covered last year, Digital Design gave us a chance to develop other skills (and also to carry-out time consuming tasks with other deadlines looming) I’d started in college. What you see below you is the fruits of taking a quick picture outside our humble abode, tracing and scanning it, and then dusting my graphics tablet off and going for a digital version of marker pen sketches...it made me see how much better sketches look with a quick bit of colour, and made animating storyboards for film/TV work a lot more visually appealing.

Help! I need somebody, not just anybody...

The pieces below are from the Digital Design & Depiction unit for the Citizens Advice Bureau. It gave me lovely memories of back in the day at college, sat in a ridonculusly warm Mac suite having to put up with waiting for print-outs of every, single, small, detail that I changed on a double page spread. But still, it didn’t hurt to get to grips with In Design this time, instead of having to put up with the temperamental program that is Quark Xpress!

Every little helps.

Yes I know these ads below are a blatant copy of Tesco’s, but that’s the whole point! Part of the copywriting bit of the Design for Advertising unit, myself and Josh had to take the style of Tesco ads and create our own Christmas versions.

Now just try imagine some friendly Cock-er-ny geeeza saying it, and we’re almost there!

When visual worlds collide

Mmm pizza. Writing this post at quarter to 1 on a Sunday when my parents have gone out, leaving me with no Sunday dinner, is probably not a good idea! (I thought we were meant to get treated when we got back from Uni now and again! pfh)

But anyway, before I shoot off to try and scape together something from the fridge, here's something me and Josh, my partner in all things creative, cooked up for another Design for Advertising brief. (sorry, that was a terrible pun, I'll be sure to burn myself when making dinner as punishment for it!).

The idea was to combine the worlds of 'pizza' and 'delivery' which was a bit of a challenge as there is so much overlap already, but I think we gave it a good shot.

Using the environment

I know Al Gore reads this blog religiously, so don't worry Al I'm not telling people to start using their 'An Inconvenient Truth' DVD as a coaster! It's just the name of the brief given for our Design for Advertising unit.

The idea behind this concept to advertise Heat magazine was thinking what Heat has (gossip, celebrity news etc.) and where people would talk about this. Public transport is the ideal place to target consumers, installing large vinyl sheets onto the windows of buses, trams and trains to make it look as if the window was steamed up, and people had written 'gossip' on it.

Retro is so now.

It's only taken me about 3 months to do it, but I'm finally getting round to putting some work up! The first piece is in response to the brief of using a past illustration/design style to advertise a product. The product I was given was the Philips Philishave. I had a look into the company history, and saw that the Philishave was first introduced in the 1950s; this was also the time of some very interesting work from graphic designers such as Saul Bass (keen readers will remember my blog post from January talking about some of his work). I decided to illustrate my ads in this style as I thought it a) reflected the company's history and b) didn't look half bad either.

Excess. Is. Ok.

I've got a free full day today, damn the current economy that requires my girlfriend to work and earn money instead of being free to spend days wandering around the park or having BBQs (saying that, the weather isn't the greatest at the minute). So instead of spending my day sat around getting my arse handed to me by 14 year old kids on Call of Duty, I plan on chucking a few pieces of my work onto this here blog.

But first, just thought I'd share with you a clothing company that's trying its best to drain my already depleted bank account dry. EIO Clothing is a company based in Lincoln (where all the best new talent is!), but they've not been confined to this glorious county, instead they're out there supplying quality clothing to the likes of Doherty, CSS, Klaxons, Jaymo & Andy George...and probably a whole heap more that us cool kids don't even know about yet!

They've just released an exclusive Moda t-shirt, which seemed to go down verrrrry well. The young gentleman at the top of the page is one part of the multi-talented crew behind Moda, who seem to be doing no wrong at the minute. A residency with a certain Mr. Tong in Ibiza this summer, continually selling out a 1600 capacity venue in Lincoln, a Moda tour later this year, and Jaymo & Andy's monthly show on Radio 1! Check it...

Anways, this post seems to be going on and on and on...so I'm goin to sign off here, go grab a cuppa, and get back to blogging about what you're all really here for...my work (well, that's what I tell myself...hoping people actually look at this!)

Peace x

Our Sun is dying...

No need to panic, I've not suddenly become a leading physicist here to make you all forget about swine-flu...I just thought I'd share with you my favourite film of the minute. It's Sunshine from Danny Boyle; I'd heard that it was a bit of a let-down, but thought I'd spend a cheeky couple of quid (cheers HMV) on a film to watch on my mammoth train journey down to Cardiff last weekend.

Needless to say I was very impressed, the cinematography is amazing, and there are some really amazing shots. Yes, a lot of them are CGI, but I was still blown away by some of parts of this film. The story-line is a tad far-fetched, but then again it is sort of sci-fi, so I'm not being critical for that. The underlying messages about humanity, and what it takes to make us lose it, is very interesting.

It's got a pretty decent soundtrack as well (and for those of you who like a good bit of electro music, check out James Zabiela/Nic Fanciulli's Essential Mix as 1+1 from August 2007 for some brilliant samples, and some 2001: A Space Odyssey ones as well)

And the winner is...

Well, the results are in! After another work-filled year, the end of 2nd year has come and gone, and I found out my fate yesterday. After waking up early feeling decidedly sick with nerves (or was it swine flu?), I made it into Uni for my tutorial, with some surprising news! I hadn't thrown the past year down the drain with a major load of stress and wasted layout paper, instead I came out with two 1st's and two 2.1's over my units! It worked out on average as a 68.5 (1.5 off a 1st...obviously didn't slip enough cash to the tutors) which I was very surprised and happy with.

So after just over a week off from thinking of Uni work (apart from the worries about results day yesterday), it's time to get back into it and sort out our book out! We've got a placement at Love Creative starting on the 1st of June, so got some extra briefs yesterday to work on and put in our book. An interesting one for Sarson's Vinegar's web presence, and a delightful one from the head CD at BBH- 'make PC's cooler than Mac's'- she called it the impossible brief, and I don't think she was kidding...but it's a challenge we're going to take on and see how we go!

Best crack on and wake Josh up now, time to get motivated and creative again!