Audio Diary

My friend Ollie has started doing an Audio Diary.












Follow his updates here on Twitter.

Small Space Ad

Fresh

Another great Old Spice spot. Not quite up there with the man your man could smell like, but good none the less.



Deep into first week here at WCRS...great to be back in the land of the living eg central London, where there are people and bars and stuff...

Day One

The bar is high

Use Your Illusion 2

Here are two awesome examples of perspective alterations.

I love this kind of thing, especially the top shot. It reminds me a bit of the ending of the Truman Show. It's a total head-fuck. The second shot is made from a simple flat 2-D metal frame.

Very clever indeed.



























Oh, and on an entirely different note, I got a new job. More soon.

A film from a friend

A friend of ours shot this delightful short film/documentary, admittedly for Christmas...I've been slow-moving on here recently sorry! His name is Ewan McNicol and he was previously at Blink. He's now set up his own company in the States called Lucid Inc.

Picc and Mix

So here's the video of the new interactive Piccadilly billboard executions that we did. It's live now.

Snes Fest

So I'm a self-confessed Nintendo nut. Sad but true. And I can't resist anything SNES. I've got a PS3 and a Wii but I keep going back to the golden SNES era...a time when they didn't rely on fancy graphics etc to make decent games.

Just before I got a job in advertising, coming up to 5 years ago now, I sold my SNES collection...console and about 60 games, many rare. Gotta pay the bills right? Gutting...and of course I got a job about 2 weeks later.

So now finally I've started buying it all again, scouring ebay like a maniac trying to grow my collection once more. I've got quite a few on the Wii's Virtual Console, but its not the same as actally having the original cartridge.

Now I can't stop. I have to have all the games I had before, and more. All the rare ones, which can be quite pricey.

This is the Daddy - Chrono Trigger. It can sell for up to £1000.














One I have managed to get my hands on again is The Secret of Mana. I'm going to start playing that soon.

Anyway, must go and buy more...I mean write some scripts....

Oh and if anyone has any old snes games kicking about in their loft I'll gladly give them a new home.

CP+B y'all

CP+B...the best agency in the world? I think it's right up there. So I'd expect a bit more originality from the fresh, young interns battling to get a job there...Flight of the Conchords have nailed this sort of video to death, and many others. But it is funny. And well done. What a place that must be. Ideas and snowboarding. A good tiring life.

The man your man could smell like

I loooooove the current Old Spice campaign and this spot is about as perfect as you can get. Great execution and an awesome line...'the man your man could smell like.' Brilliant.

Holy Smoke

A friend's Straight 8 entry from a couple of years back.

Cult classic not best seller...



(Movie on twice for some reason!)

Playing with Piccadilly

Here are some more of the interactive executions from the McDonald's Piccadilly sign (click on it to view bigger). It's all live right now. I'll post a video soon too...the 'Rock, Paper, Scissors' is my favourite. We tried to stage the world's first Rock, Paper, Scissors competition down there, but Westminster Council put a stop to it...boooooooo.

Teletransporter

Like it.

The times they are a'changin'

Changes are a-foot...but more on that later.

I've noticed loads of people (girls) have been putting colours as their Facebook statuses, mainly black or white. Intrigued, I did a google search and it turns out that to raise awareness for Breast Cancer women have been encouraged to write the colour of the bra they're wearing as their status...and eventually everyone will go 'why???' as I did. Quite like it!


















Another interesting thing that caught my eye this week was the blog of a sleep-talking man, written by his wife/his subconscious. Cool idea.

Star Wars Weather

Here's a cool idea for displaying the weather. Here's today's outlook in Star Wars weather:














Looking forward to seeing the next updates, so summer should be like Tattoine. Here's the link. Hope my train home to Cornwall doesn't freeze tonight...I haven't packed my tauntaun.

Speaking of Tauntauns, check out this AWESOME sleeping bag. I want it. Badly.

It must be Christmas...

There's a dog in the office! Hurrah! Hurrah for Ralph!



What's not to like about dogs running on polished wooden floors?!

The Mother of all Christmases

So, for me this is the best agency Xmas idea this year and it's a cracker from Mother. A really amusing idea this...



Great stuff. What a decent chap Theo is too...he could've kept half and given away half, but hey!

Also, I'm really interested in the beards the creative pair who conceived the idea have cultivated. My beard is getting bushier by the day. I'm giving it 'til summer 2010.

FWA website awards

Check out the best websites of the year according to the FWA.

Here's the link.

Super-Slick New MTV Idents

Idents are a great brief to get. They usually serve to sponsor a certain programme - so the USP is all there for you...for example Nintendogs sponsor 'It's Me or the Dog'. It's just a case of bringing it to life in a cool way. Also, clients don't tend to be as strict with them as they are for regular full length tv ads, so as a creative you tend to be able to get away with more stuff.

Case in point - for Nintendo a couple of years back, we were able to get some really fun stuff through, but when it came to the main TV ads the client became well anal. This obviously led to Nintendo being resigned by the agency...but that's another story.

Anyway, I got side-tracked. Here are some great new idents for MTV created by the super-slick Universal Everything. These sort of channel idents, for the likes of MTV and E4, are even better as the only product they're advertising is themselves, so there are fewer creative restrictions. Hence these ones are brilliantly random...and as I mentioned, they're super-slick, colourful and clean as a whistle. The first one is my favourite.

School of Saatchi

I have to say I was a bit worried when I heard about the concept of this series - a kind of X-Factor for art. But actually I was pleasantly surprised by how good it was.

If you haven't seen it, I won't spoil it by saying who won. All I will say is that the winner has a very strong name.

Watch all 4 episodes of the series here.

Give it a ponder

This is a brilliant campaign. Great idea, beautifully observed. No I didn't do it. Gutted.

Avatar surely below par

Is it just me or does James Cameron's 'amazing' new movie Avatar look like a big pile of steaming crap??? Am I the only one who thinks this? The whole world seems to be going crazy for it.



















I hate CGi anyway so maybe I'm biased, but it kind of looks like a new Star Wars Phantom Menace...on acid.



And 'avatars'?! Please. So 2004. What's next Second Life the Movie??? The Sims 3D??? It's definitely one of those ones where when James Cameron first thought of it, funnily enough in 2004-ish, it was the big new thing...of course now the whole avatar concept is so dated.

Don't even get me started on the font...like a crap new-age rainforest cafe logo or something. And to make matters worse a huge new advertising campaign across 5 billboards is being put up outside my office window. It's got 3D rocks and crazy flying metal birds coming out of it.

I weep for the future.

What the world has come to

The perks of working on Maccy D's

Clever Japanese Man Talking

Vampire Weekend 'Cousins' vid

I rather like Vampire Weekend...probably a bit cliched now, but you know when you do that thing in your itunes and see which tracks you've played the most, I did that recently and Vamp Wkend were most played by some considerable margain. Here's their new music vid...not entirely sure what's going on, but it's in a back alley in New York on a motion control rig and there's colourful drawings on the wall and stuff, so it has to be cool.



Their website's pretty sweet too, nicely put together. It's here.

Pic-tastic

I hadn't checked into my Flickr account for a while, so when I did so a few days ago I was well surprised to find a message from a lady in America. She wanted to use one of the photos I took when in California on my honeymoon earlier this year.

It's this one of a boy surfing at Carmel beach.














I was pretty chuffed to find out that it'll soon be used in the Schmap Guide to Monterey & Carmel! An online and printed guidebook to that area. Crazy eh?

Here's the link to my Flickr Photostream.

Dig it up

We've also been doing the latest batch of concepts for the interactive McDonald's digital Piccadilly sign, which will be out soon...in fact a couple came out on Halloween, although sadly we didn't get a photo with human interaction as we were abroad, but you get the idea...bit of fun innit.

Something to report

It's all been a bit crazy recently, hence the lack of posts. Been making loads of stuff plus had time off for family reasons. Anyway, here are some pics from a government print shoot we did recently, for Apprenticeships. It was a real quick turn around job, in fact I had to go straight to the shoot from the airport after getting back from film shoot in Hong Kong (will post soon hopefully, if Chinese lady client can make some decisions). Pretty gnarly.

The entire set was half size...quite an odd experience. Check out the tiny little plugs! Anyway, it turned out ok in the end, for a government newspaper ad anyway...and yes, that is cocaine spilling out from one of the boxes.

You wanna piece of me?

The things you see in Hong Kong...

Blade Runner 2

In Hong Kong on a shoot at the moment, pretty awesome...more to follow.

Fear of Production?

So we're making quite a few bits and bobs at the moment. It's always the way - months of sitting in your office, then suddenly loads of jobs seem to go into production at the same time.

We're currently editing one tv spot, doing a stills shoot and then off east at the weekend to shoot another film. Busy busy which is great, but we often joke about 'fear of production'...that is will the idea that's in your head/on the page be as good once you've made it? Will you get the director you want? Will the acting, animation or sets be any good? Will the stars align properly? I must say that I find the whole production process quite stressful and drawn out...probably because I'm quite impatient, and possibly a bit of a control freak. It all takes quite a long time to get anywhere, plus I guess I'm still learning about how much input/power it's best to put into the production stage - it differs from job to job I suppose.

My favourite part of being a creative is without doubt the 'aha!' moment of finally getting a great idea on your pad. Sure the excitement of a big shoots can be great, but I still just love coming up with ideas. Of course I understand that to be good at this job you not only have to be good at coming up with ideas, but also selling them, wrangling clients and guiding the production process to fit your vision.

Anyway maybe my opinion will change one day when I'm completely satisfied by something I've put out there...but that sadly seems to rarely happen as too many people want to stick their oars in along the way. Anyway, I'll chuck some of our new stuff up here in the not so distant future and we can all decide whether my fear of production is rationale or not. Actually, what I may do is post up the original idea as it was on the bit of paper it was first presented on alongside the finished piece to see if it lives upto any kind of potential it had, if anyone's interested?

Cadbury 'Zingolo'

I'm sure this, as usual will split opinion. I happen to really like it - it's happy and unusual and I wish I'd done it.



Questionable special effects though, not the sparks, which I think are cool, more the giant head doesn't always seem to have the correct shadows. But I'm being picky. It's great.

Ferris is back, tell a friend...

Apologies to anyone who actually reads this crap I spout.

Been super busy recently, juggling an array of jobs.

Shocking weather in the village today, just want to be curled up in the shelter of my home with a Blu-Ray. Bloody bleak and freezing it is.

One exciting thing to look forward to this week: Radio Awards on Thursday night where the one and only Peter Andre is performing. Can't wait.

Head Scratch

Check out this amazing new short film by Mr Chris Cairns of Partizan.



It's titled 'Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs'. Some amazing little touches in here, aswell as some sicker than sick scratching.

Well w-well well done done done.

Fox O'Clock

Wes Anderson's amazing new film Fantastic Mr Fox is on the horizon and I'm super excited after watching the trailer here.































It looks epic and as always with Wes Anderson's films the art direction and attention to detail looks stunning. He does like his varying shades of yellow doesn't he? Also, I'm sure I've seen Wes Anderson himself wearing a suit exactly the same as Mr Fox...tweed and such. Brilliant.











I wonder what Mr Dahl would think of it...I'm sure he'd be well happy.

Another animated film out soon is the new Pixar movie Up.


















I saw it when I was in California a few months back and it's rather special, mainly thanks to it being one of the first new 3D flicks. As you'd expect from a Pixar film, the quality of animation is brilliant, but it's the 3D-ness that will blow your mind. Worth going to see it for the experience alone.

The storyline - well, that's where it lacks a bit...the premise is simple, but it soon spirals into a contrived and random tale, a bit of a poor man's Howl's Moving Castle if you ask me. But it is definitely worth a watch, even just for the excellent short film that precedes the main feature. Out in October over here I think.

Chinchilla Thriller

Looking directors at the moment, and I'm loving this spot to advertise Las Vegas (!) It goes off on such a randomly brilliantly tangent, and you know they had an awesome time on set!

It's shot by Roderick Fenske at Hungry Man.

Sadly this time it's not quite what I'm looking for. Another time Roderick, another time...

Spiffing Screensavers

This site has some great screensavers to download. The Lego brick one is extra special.

http://www.9031.com/downloads/screensavers.html

Lonely Lodger

I'm on my own for 2 weeks at the moment.

Mr D has left me to fend for myself.

God help us all.

Desktop Sexiness

So, I'm back from my holiday in baking hot Majorca. Back to work, and back to exciting computer desktops. Like this one.












PS. Don't you dare look in my folders or tell anyone about utorrent...
I don't use it, honest.