oh, and if you want the ringtone…
How Naive…
…was I?
The Charlie Show
Did you ever watch the Truman show and think, ‘Wow, wouldn’t it be weird having all those people watching you, for entertainment, whilst you are totally oblivious’ It’d be well shit. Well, these people have been observed by over 150 000 000 people for entertainment purposes and they haven’t the foggiest about it.
I don’t know.
I might make some merchandise, well if the parents don’t, I might. And a ringtone as well. Oh, and a dance remix ringtone.
What really happens when girl sits on boy’s knee.
Maybe it’s just me, but this is what i think happens.
A message to those studying advertising
Know your role. Things are changing in advertising. The most forward thinking agencies are becoming increasingly interested in talent that has NOT studied advertising. Sounds strange doesn’t it? But it’s true. And it’s scary if you study advertising. So, what is your role? Creatives will need to be well versed in collaboration. Encourage that yourself. Do projects with other students, collaborate with product designers, photographers, poets, whatever is necessary to explore your ideas. It will look super. Also, find a passion that isn’t advertising, and explore it, deeply, because if your passion is advertising, then your ideas will be self referential. STOP looking at advertising. Perhaps as an advertiser you must train your business sense, because it is likely that the talent outside of advertising is commercially naive. Understand where the commercial side of advertising is going, which is basically much more than just media. But experiential, services, innovations. Anything that solves a consumer problem. You should now simply aim to be a lubricant between consumers and brands. So don’t become a student of advertising, become a student of change.
Art Direction Basics Are Incredibly Complex.
In the nature of communication ‘simplicity’ is the doctrine and the role of the art director is to make a specific point quickly through a series of visual symbols.
Now, each time a new element is introduced into the composition, the complete view i.e. what the eye has to comprehend, becomes more complex.
Consider Plato’s Theory of Forms.
Let’s say to express my concept, I need to have a character sat on a chair.
Now, Plato’s interest is not within a specific chair or any specific physical object, but within the shared idea or collective understanding of ‘the chair’
When a child draws a house it’s usually one door, four windows, a slanted roof and perhaps a chimney.
And as adults, we can all agree that a chair has a certain form that we accept in order to recognize and socially understand it’s reality. It has four legs. It maybe has a specific height. But for the purposes of this communication, the chair simply needs to be invisible. The time taken to realise that it’s a chair must be minimised because it is one of many elements that add up to provide your message.
So, because we can all imagine a chair, it is surely this ‘shared imagination’ of what a chair is, that designers must tap into in order to communicate their point quickly. However, as society progresses, this becomes more complex. Let’s say the character on the chair needs to be within an office. This could mean that the designer now has the now more difficult task of tapping into the shared idea of an ‘office chair’, still keeping it simple, perhaps it can be as easy as adding wheels to the chair.
Anyway, on a base level, this is the role of the art director. To understand how to use visual symbols to construct a composition.
But it’s infinitely more complex.
What if the composition requires expressing something more subjective. How do you visualize a criminal? Someone with a hood up? Or someone with a stripey top? Or, how do you visualize perhaps a person from Australia? Knowing that you have a very limited time to express among other things that this man is Australian?
Ethics start to come into play. Would I be enforcing a stereotype if I were to visualize an Australian as a man in a cork hat? After all it is that which is perhaps the simplest visual cue an Art Director can use and is therefore communicating a message more efficiently, but do all Australians wear cork hats? Not at all.
I guess the point I’m making is that art direction is a lot more scientific than we perhaps think. It’s just incredibly complex. Be more aware of these universal forms and remember them, they are everywhere. And they will help en route to simplicity.
I think it would be a good thing for someone like Getty images to explore. Perhaps they could do a ‘Form Search’ in which they offer up the simplest possible visual representation of what one is looking for i.e the office chair that most effectively communicates the idea of an office chair to an audience. If you get me. Like a universal design language or at least a western one anyway.
I’ll be back on this topic.
Digital Ghandi Strikes
I had my first opportunity to strike justice as Digital Ghandi. Booya. Righteous.
Type Nicely
I’ve had it! It’s so disheartening to see a platform open for such fantastic debate getting reduced to petty squables. Someone needs to say something. Where IS the respect.
I think I’m going to start being a vigilante comment moderator. Like a kinda digital Ghandi. Perhaps the problem is that it’s all anonymous. No-one knows who you are, like I could verbally assault you now. But I won’t because I’m nice. Anyway NO time to waste… TO THE FORUMS! PEACE AND GOODWILL.
First Skeletor, Now He-Man
Two superpowers in a week! What are the chances? Now, He-Man has expressed a keen interest in the Job Donor scheme after being sidelined by Hollywood and entering the not-so-glamourous takeaway food industry. Our hearts are with you He-Man.
Skeletor Desperate
Remember Skeletor? He’s been emailing all week, apparently he is desperate to get onto the Job Donors waiting list. Wait your turn Skeletor, wait your turn.
Geek like me.
I secretly filmed my Dell computer singing.
Stay tuned, I think he also does the pussy cat dolls version…
Targeted Advertising FAIL
It really is about time for targeted advertising to become a little more intelligent. Either that or HP need a little more criminal ‘discretion’.
Sinead O’Conner (The Onion Cut)
wanted to do this for ages…
oh, they’ve banned the music from it already..lame
Youtube Mad!
I had a spare weekend and so I locked myself in the house and started making youtube videos. It’s just a numbers game, so before long, I will have a HIT!
Here’s the rest of ‘em!
Oh Andrew!
Andrew Marr is making some kind of documentary about shampoo.
Apparently he’s stopped using it.
Erm… maybe it’s just me, but isn’t Andrew Marr pretty much bald?
Burger King
made a secret Burger King Ad. Mwah haha
Spiders on Ecstasy
I made a video on Youtube.
IRATE TV
If I were to make a TV channel… this would be my pitch:
“irate.tv has one simple premise. To smash your TV.
….and a couple of smaller premises to get there. To give viewers the content they want. To create democratic broadcasting. To be involved with the plot. To fire characters you don’t like. To request what you want to see rather than be told. To add a new character. To not have to filter through hours of crap to find something to watch. To be able (sometimes) to relax with your computer like you did with your TV, not having to endlessly click around to find what you want. Youtube is ok, but tends to be tedious and sparse in quality, plus it doesn’t really replace the TV, its more of a visual library. The BBC iPlayer, Channel4OD are too much like TV, the programming is too rigid. We will blow your minds and leave you with eyes as square as a scrabble piece. Capiche?”
Pizza Wisdom
For many years I have been honing my pizza making skills. I have done in depth research, experiments and so on. Today i made the best pizza yet. I have become very reductionist and only make margaritas because thats a pizza in its basic form. I’ve even started having just tomato. Here are my top tips:
Make the dough using yeast that you have to activate in hot water. Don’t ask why, just do.
It’s crucial to either leave the dough overnight in the fridge or even better freeze it for a while then use; it handles better and tastes better.
It’s also better when it’s a little bit sticky.
Use semolina instead of flour to coat your pizza. It absorbs more moisture from the surface giving you a crispier crust.
For the sauce: Don’t even bother with tinned tomatoes. My favourite is simply a quater onion/1 garlic clove per person gently fried in olive oil, then add butter, basil and tomatoes puree. Then add water until consistency is a little watery and simmer. Season with lots of sugar/salt & pepper.
Now, you are unlikely to have a woodfired oven so do this:
Before cooking the pizza, put some olive oil in your baking tray and wack it on the hob for 5 or so minutes. It should bubble up nicely. Now dress the pizza while its still on the hob, then when finished, shove it under the grill at high temp for around 8 minutes.
Hey pesto!
YouTeach
On Youtube today I learnt two things:
How to draw eyes; and
How to make Napalm (petrol + polystyrene)
Phenom-enom-enom
Phenomenom as a word is unecessarily long.
Ph -enom -enom
There is this sort of wierd double ‘enom’ at the end.
I reckon the word was just ‘phenom’, but somewhere along the line in it got lost in translation by a man with an echoey voice and whenever he said it everyone thought: ‘Shit! all this time I’ve been saying ‘phenom’, how stupid do i feel?’
60′s French Counter Culturist Don’t Beat Their Wives!
Beer advertising. Hmmm, someone should write a book about it.
Mother’s new campaign for 4% Stella is a masterstroke.
Strangely, when advertising beer you are not allowed to talk about getting drunk. Instead you talk about the person who drinks the beer, he’s your mate, he likes what you like, or he’s the man you’d love to have a pint with. Mother chose to reference a slightly obscure, but very artsy French film movement ‘La Nouvelle Vague” with their 4% campaign. Now, the kind of person who beats on his wife probably thinks ‘Truffaut’ is a kind of chocolate. Subsequently… Stella; consider your wife-beater image dead and buried.
Attack of the C.G.I
Here is my B-Movie horror idea. It’s a satire about the use of special effects as opposed to a plot. The protagonist is attempting to create a film, however there is a special effects guy who’s a whizz on the computer and obsessed with C.G.I sent from Hollywood who is destined to ruin the film with uneccessary special effects which begin to seem almost… too real.
Sweet Chilli
Sweet chilli sauce. You buy some, you add it in increasing amounts to your food, then you overkill it. It happens everytime! It gives me bi-polar tastebuds. This never happened with good ole tabasco. It must be the sugar. Damn sugar.
Last Meal
I’ve got it, for my last meal I would like, 1 whole swordfish, uncooked.
Then I would snap off the sword and joust my way outta there!
Wheelie Boring
Fuck you, pun intended! no apologies. Pun rhymes with fun. Anyway, I need a way to make money quickly and easily. I think I might have found a niche or as the Americans say (nitch) in personalized Wheelie Bins. I’m gonna take it up to the sniffling toffs in Marlow as soon as this rubbish idea is fully realized.
Who am I?
A person is ultimately defined by their actions. It’s easy to define someone else because their actions are all you have to go on and they are concrete, however when looking at myself, I can’t distinguish my actions from my intentions, or my thoughts or my ideals, the whole thing becomes very cloudy and unobjective. Who are you? Is a bloody difficult question to answer, YOU TELL ME
Go!
Right sam, from now on you write, you learn you soak, you ANALYSE!
This is where it goes down.
This is where your thoughts, dreams, doodles, ideas belong. Don’t be afraid. Go!
