Saatchi Brief No. 4 Response

So my last post was about the 4th brief for a place on the Saatchi & Saatchi Summer Scholarship, where we all had individual 5 minute Skype interviews and had to 'bring our CVs to life'. (For more info see my last post)

The brief was challenging, and initially I found it really hard to come up with an original idea. An example was given by Saatchi, of maybe getting a choir to sing on skype for the interview; sounds pretty fun but it conditioned me to think about performances and I guessed everyone else would probably think that way as well. After a few hours chatting to my housemates about it, one of them said it would be cool to do it from outside the office which made me think, it would be even cooler to do it from inside the office or even from the same room.

So that very quickly became the plan- to walk in on my own skype interview.

Last Friday I managed to get in contact with Massimo Fiori at Saatchi and ask him if he'd be able to help me get into the office and into my interview. Luckily, he was happy to oblige me, so at 7 on Wed morning (having not been able to sleep at all on Tues night) I was on the bus on the way up to 80 Charlotte Street. I arrived there at about 12.30 for my 1pm interview and was met by Massimo who gave me the password for the wireless and a seat in reception. At about five-to-one 'THE CALL' came through (not quite as 24 as I've just made it sound though. Jack Bower can handle his nerves, whereas I was a proper mess).

My memory of that next ten minutes isn't fantastic but I answered the skype call and said something like 'Hi Saatchi, your brief was to bring my CV to life, and there has only been one way I could think of doing that, so if you'll bear with me one minute...'. Then I hung up on skype and walked into the room they were in. 'I could only really bring it to life by coming up here in person'.

It seemed to go down quite well, and everyone was really nice. Although I walked into the room expecting to see 3 or 4 people, and I think there were actually about 7.

I'd prepared about 50 A4 bits of paper with little phrases, pictures and stickmen that I held up as I did my presentation; sort of Bob Dylan style but much cruder. I did my presentation and then it went straight into questions, which were a mix of things about the industry eg. 'where do you see advertising being in ten years time?' and personal stuff like 'what makes you angry'. This only lasted a couple of minutes and I think I had a fair go at answering them.

That was pretty much it really. Like I said, they were all so nice and it really cemented for me that this is what I want to do, and the sort of people I want to work with.

When I got home I had a tweet from one of the guys who had been in the room, Nick Gold. It only said 'well done' but that was cool and topped off the whole day for me. Also, I got a phone call from Julia yesterday and found out I've made it to the final stage, so I'm going back to Charlotte Street on Friday for the morning. That's about it really. Was such a awesome experience, albeit a bit nerve-racking. So glad I took the risk.

I really enjoyed getting to meet them all though, and it definitely paid off- I'm thought to the final 25 and have to go back next Friday morning.

Saatchi Brief No. 4

For those interested, here is Brief Number 4 from Saatchi & Saatchi.

CONGRATULATIONS. YOU’RE NOW JUST ONE ROUND AWAY FROM THE FINAL AT CHARLOTTE ST.

This brief will test your ability to think on your feet.

The live, 3-minute web cam CV presentation.

Yes, that’s right. You’ll have 3 minutes to bring your CV to life, live over Skype.

3 minutes of our full, undivided attention to sell yourself to us.

Don’t just read out your CV. That’s boring. Think about how you can turn it into a memorable, interesting, fun and creative presentation. Think of it as a performance.

You don’t actually need to do the presentation yourself. So for example you could write a song about yourself and get a friendly choir to perform it live. But you must be there to answer some questions directly after your presentation.

The presentations will take place in 5 minute time slots from 10:00 – 14:30 GMT on Tuesday 5th and Wednesday 6th April. You’ll need a web cam and decent speed broadband. Don’t even think about doing this with dial up. Seriously. Also, you can only do one interview.

From this the 24 best presentations will then be invited to attend The Final, here at 80 Charlotte St on 14/15th April.

Here’s what you’ll need to do.

Book your slot by tagging yourself on the time you want on the pictures on Julia’s profile page. Then confirm the time by leaving a comment beneath (e.g. 10:00-10:05). This will be done on a strictly first come, first served basis. Once a time slot has gone, it has gone. Please do not tag any time that has already been tagged.

Download Skype and create an account (don’t worry, it’s free).

http://www.skype.com/

Add us as a contact. Our Skype username is saatchirecruiting.

Then be online at the specified time and wait for us to call you on Skype.

Please keep your presentation to a maximum of 3 minutes. Remember, you don’t have to use it all.

Good luck and see you at the final.

Ooo... how exciting! Will let you know when I think of how I want to do it :)

Saatchi & Saatchi Brief 3

So, it's been a while since I've written anything, and as usual this is as a result of Uni work. I've got an essay to write at the moment but I'll quickly update you on what I've been up to before I continue.

So... the twitter thing for Saatchi went really well. I got through that stage, which was nice! I don't really know how they judged it, but it occurred to me when I was in the shower yesterday that it was probably just based on Klout. It's a bit irrelevance to be honest, as I got through, but something to consider if I end up partaking again next year and the format is very similar.

Got about 370 followers at the moment, but not really sure what to do with them. I feel bad, as they follow zombieapocatips out of good faith in the hope of some funny zombie stuff but I don't really have time to keep tweeting, for now. Will have a think about what to do with the account....

So yes, that went well...then came an exam (this was brief 2). It was a multiple choice job and we were allowed to use the internet to help us. Questions were on Saatchi & Saatchi, current clients, employees, different campaigns, also a bit on social media and that sort of thing. To be honest I did find it quite hard but I guess my masterful use of google managed to get me through, as I made it onto brief 3....

Brief 3 was given on 8th March and was as follows:

"AFTER THIS ROUND YOU’LL BE JUST ONE ROUND AWAY FROM AN INTERVIEW AT SAATCHI & SAATCHI.

Brief no.3 will test your presentation and selling skills, as well as your ability to recognize a great idea.

Choose what you consider to be a great ad, then recreate it yourself in a video.

You must appear at the beginning of your vid, before the ad, and in no more than 90” sell your ad to us. Explain why you chose it and why it’s a great idea. Really sell it and yourself to us. Imagine you’re pitching an ad to a client. Be as memorable as possible. Please note the whole vid can be longer, only the intro must be 90” max.

Upload your vid to our youtube channel (see link below), and post the link on Julia’s wall no later than

12 noon/midday GMT, Thursday 24th March.

Only the 50 best vids as chosen by us will go through.

Your video will be judged on:

90” presentation.

Ad choice.

How memorable and entertaining it is overall.

You don’t have to appear in the ad, but can if you want, but you do have to introduce it.

It doesn’t have to be a UK ad, but it must be in English. No subtitles.

Good luck and cue you…"

Pretty exciting stuff! And it was so much fun! I came up with an idea of what I wanted to do quite quickly, and the first week or so was spent talking it through with various friends (who have been invaluable). Last Saturday was when we finally shot it, and it went pretty well. Everyone was really good fun and put up with my indecisiveness and decision at the end of filming that I wanted to go back and redo the first half of the shots as the light had changed.

Then Sunday was spend editing and Monday/Tuesday evening writing the pitch. Filmed the pitch on Wednesday with the help of all of my housemates and then got it on youtube! The reception has been really positive, and I'm pleased with the finished product. Just got to wait and see what Saatchi thought of it, now.... will let you know!

Interactive Manifesto

Oooooo.... I failed at keeping you all up to date with the latest on the Saatchi & Saatchi stuff. But good news, it went well. Made it through the twitter round and now I'm on a new brief which I've had some ideas for.

Anyway, here is something I've been doing recently. My friend ran in the Student Union elections recently and we put him together an interactive manifesto to go with it. It was so fun to make. Hope you enjoy it. (You'll need to watch it in youtube, and with annotations on)

A better day

So tired, so here's a quick summary of what happened today. I had a lot of reading to do for a seminar and some reading to do for my dissertation and...I got a bit desperate for some attention on twitter. Decided to put out a desperately needy 'need more followers, please retweet' job and actually got quite alot of new followers on board. It wasn't cool, but I was stumped on how to carry things on with limited time available. Tomorrow should be a better day as I have no lectures or seminars, just Juliet Gardiner's new book 'Blitz' to wade through.

Tweets: 80

Following: 153

Followers: 216

Mentions and retweets: About 33/34 retweets and 12 mentions.

Night

Today's update

Hello, hello.

I don't think I wrote on here yesterday in the end. Was a busy day out and about doing things that meant I was away from twitter until the evening. (A welcome break).

Got back on it today, but it's been slow progress thus far. Followers have increased a little, and I've been retweeted a few times and been chatting with people but I feel like I need to come up with something new, and keep things fresh. I'm worried that it's getting a bit stale. Not had any fresh ideas this evening but I'll have a sleep on it and will hit it hard tomorrow. I need to raise my profile, more. Maybe I should be tracking down more famous people and getting them to mention me. On that note, I had a good one yesterday. Was tweeting with a guy out of the Walking Dead, which was pretty cool. Also picked up some magazines as followers and been contracted by a media guy based in Bristol who was interested in what I was up to.

Will hit it properly again tomorrow. Need another day where I get 100 or so followers. Although, I have quite a lot of reading to do for a seminar so we will have to see how I'm doing. Anyway... stats

Tweets: 66

Following: 150

Followers: 178

Mentions and retweets: Maybe 10/12 mentions and 3/4 retweets

Oh yeah, following has gone down as I cut a few people who weren't related to zombies and that. They were people from Uni who I followed initailly to try and generate some follow backs. Gone, breakthrough.

Night

Third Day

So it's my third full day of tweeting and as predicted it's been a bit of a slow one. I've been busy most of the day so far preparing a presentation and haven't really had much chance to blog or tweet with people. However, a few new followers have joined since last night.

I didn't end up going to bed when I said. Decided to have a little look for a few more people who might be worth following and stumbled across #zombiesurvivalcrew. Found their leader and got in contact which resulted in a few retweets and consequent new followers, but I did stay up pretty late to get them. It's all good though :)

Tweets: 44

Following: 192

Followers: 151

Mentions and retweets: Maybe 10 mentions and 2 or 3 retweets so far

I need to add stuff to the blog now. I wrote a little bit about the zombie survival crew and tweeted it which got noticed. Got some good publicity in return from them which is what it's all about, I suppose.

To be honest, I'm not sure how much more will get done today. Probably going to head to the pub after I've made dinner. I'll end up tweeting on my phone, though. Seriously, this is so addictive.

End of today

It's the end of my second full day of tweeting for the Saatchi & Saatchi grad scheme and it's been a bit of a mad one.

Things started off slowly as I had that dissertation meeting (which went OK, cheers for asking) but got pretty crazy as the afternoon went on. A friend I met when travelling in 2009 offered me some brilliant advice that really got me thinking about the ways I was trying to reach out to more people on twitter.

He got me thinking about who I was following and for what reason, so I went and sought out some big zombie/horror twitter accounts and then checked up on people who followed them, making the assumption they'd be interested in what I was up to. Turns out that quite a few of them were.

Then I stumbled across #zombietweets which turned out to be gold. In the space of about 3/4 hours I got 40/50 retweets and about 60 new followers. Stats as follows:

Tweets: 31

Following: 188

Followers: 131

Mentions and retweets: maybe 30/35 mentions and 40/50 retweets

I'm pretty sure this whole thing isn't about who can get the most followers and the most retweets. I've read the brief quite a lot of times now and It's got to be about interaction. I want to have regular interactions with the followers I already have. If I get more, then that's great but I think it's more important that I stay true to the idea and have fun tweeting with people.

Tomorrow is a busy day for me, as I'm giving a presentation at a Climate change conference on Sunday and need to practice it, but I've set up a Tumblr today, and the plan is to add some more things to it if and when I have time. Will try and get a few more tweets out there as well.

I'll keep you posted, night.

Saatchi & Saatchi Grad Scheme

A few days ago Saatchi & Saatchi released the details of the first challenge for their grad scheme. It was as follows...

Brief 1.

This brief will test your originality, creativity and ability to connect to a mass audience.

Create ONE new Twitter page. The objective is to get the highest Twitter rating and social influence as possible before the deadline.

The 250 people with the highest combined scores from briefs no.1 and no.2 will go through to round 3. But don’t worry about brief no.2 just yet. We’ll let you know about that soon.

You will score points for the following.

- Followers

- Updates (tweets)

- Retweets (of your tweet by other people only)

- @mentions (of you by other people only)

Your page can be about whatever you want. The more interesting, original, witty and creative the more chance you have of it taking off. But think carefully, we will only accept your first entry.

Don’t just start your page and get all your mates to follow you. This probably won’t be enough. How can you create a buzz and get as high a rating as possible? Be creative. Use your initiative. Impress the socks off us and scare off the other contestants in the process.

But remember this is a job application, so please use your loaf and have some common sense. Do not trick or mislead people in any way, make promises you cannot keep, do anything illegal, that could be considered offensive, or of questionable morality.

There was a bit more but that was the general idea.

It took me a few days to decide what to do, but in the end opted for an account called 'ZombieApocatips'. Pretty much does what it says on the tin; gives tips to survive the zombie apocalypse.

Its been 24 hours since I went live and I'm pretty happy with it all so far. Stats are as follows:

Tweets: 8

Following: 147

Followers: 46

Mentions and Retweets: I'm not gonna count but quite a few mentions and several retweets.

Sort of panic followed at first, but will cut back on people in a few days. I think that by the end of the weekend I should be hitting 500 followers. Hoping things will snowball.

Got a plan of what I'm going to tweet over the next few days but tomorrows project is to get people interacting on #zombieapocalypse. Will do a daily update to keep you informed. For now, its bed time. I've got a dissertation meeting tomorrow. Gonna stick a book under my pillow and hopefully by tomorrow I'll be fully informed of the goings on at Will's coffee house in the restoration period. Night x

Tutorials

Getting offensively lax with my photoshop practice due to essays and exams but here are a couple of things I've made from tutorials this evening.

Just taken a couple of hours away from the revision to try and brush up on my photo manipulation (which is pretty basic to say the least) and I'm quite happy with them.

Like I said, both from tutorials so nothing too exciting, but if you fancied a go the first is available here and the second is available here.

That is all. I will do more in the coming weeks, I promise.

Lego+Stopmotion

LEGO and stop-motion animation seem to be the perfect partners and seeing as I bought a camera over Christmas, I now desperately want to get some LEGO.

So yes, I think that is something I'm going to pursue over the next few weeks. Not right now, unfortunately, as I've got deadlines for Uni at the moment. But soon.

Here's a couple of videos I saw that inspired me. The first one is a short for LEGO done by Blue Source and the second is a music video by Rymdreglage that has been shortlisted for Youtube Play. Check it.

Telefish

This is something I've been working on for a couple of weeks when I have had an hour or so in the evenings.

I'm pretty pleased with it at the moment, but as usual I really struggled with the colours and am not too sure I like them. Damn you colour-blindness...damn youuuu.

If you have some ideas or some feedback I'd very much like to hear them. Cheers, bye now.

Fresh out the sketch book part 2

Found this lady on a blog when I was up late one night, so decided to copy her down.

Good practice I figured :)

Fresh out the sketch book

Been pretty manic at Uni recently with deadlines leading up to Christmas, but heres a few things I've managed to scan in straight out of the old sketch book.

These are my telefish. It's an idea I had for a while, but only just got around to sticking on paper. Check back because I plan on having a play around with these, maybe experimenting in flash with them.

Oh, I must mention I didn't come up with the name 'telefish', my housemate called them that.

Amnesty Internation 'Making the Invisible, Visible'

Been a bit quiet recently due to an influx of Uni work, so haven't had much time to snoop around the internet for new and exciting things.

BUT, fear not. I saw this on Creative Review and it's definitely worth a talk about.

Amnesty International have just released this new campaign to raise awareness of their work, in this case for Troy Davis who has sat on death row for nineteen years now and maintained it's for a crime he didn't commit. Seven of the nine witnesses have since withdrawn there testimony.

Anyway, it's by that lovely little London based agency, Brothers and Sisters, who've teamed up with Mentalgassi for this unusual spot.

Check it out.

Troy Davis: Making the invisible visible from Amnesty International on Vimeo.

Storm Freerun - Volume 1

This promotional video for 'Storm', a team of free-runners has been on out there for just over a week now and has already amassed some 400,000 hits.

It's easy to see why as not only are these guys incredible at jumping around London, but Claudiu Voicu has done a sterling job of both filming and editing the eight-minute masterpiece.

The whole thing is shot on a Canon 5D and a Canon 1D, and really shows the versatility of these DSLRs.

Yeah, that's all I've got to say really. Watch it NOW.

Check Claudiu's website out here.

And the Storm team here.

Another recent poster

This is a poster I did a couple of weeks ago, for a friend who was organising a club night for cancer research.

I think it reflects my recent obsession with Soviet propaganda quite well, and it was really fun to make. Sort of went through a couple of reinventions before I was happy with it, but it came out all right in the end.

Not sure old Eisenhower would be the biggest fan of seeing his head used like this, but I'm not the biggest fan of his decision to starve some 700,000 German captives to death at the end of the Second World War. Call it evens?

Movember

To me at least, Movember has become more of an occasion each year, for the past couple of years. I think it's probably because as I get older, the fact I can't grow any facial hair becomes more of an issue for me and I sink further into the depths of the internet, searching for a non-surgical solution.

Those who listen to my show on Surge Radio will know that I've pretty much exhausted all options, and my earlier thoughts that a high meat diet would result in a definite moustache were wrong. It's now.... day 18, and there is still nothing on my top lip.

But anyway, for those who are growing a moustache and would like some inspiration on what style to go for, check out these posters by Shotopop. There's a look there for the Victorian gentleman from any walk of life. Good show.

New title bit

I've literally just finished off the new title bit and uploaded it. Think I'm pretty pleased with it :)

It was more of an experiment in how to go from sketch to finished picture than anything else, but I am quite happy with the end result.

This was my first time making use of both Photoshop and Illustrator to do an illustration, and to be fair I didn't find it too confusing. Yaay! Admittedly I did only use the AutoTrace tool in Illustrator...but meh. I'm going to learn other ways that offer more control soon.

So yeah, that is all.

Here is the original sketch.

Text style based on an illustration by Christian Bennett

More!

My other 12Foot6 favourite has to be 'Dave Goes To Skane'. I won't post any more of their videos after this one; if you want to check them out their website is here, and their Vimeo profile is here.

This was a campaign for 'Visit Sweden'. Dave offers a solid British envoy. "Oi, Eureka. Which way to Southend?"

Dave Goes To Skane - Visit Sweden from 12foot6 on Vimeo.

12Foot6

12Foot6 are relatively new to me, but I can't get enough of their animations at the moment.

The first animation I saw was a trailer for an upcoming project called 'Get Well Soon', which is a series of animated short films about personal injury. It hasn't been released yet, but will premier at Animated Encounters this Friday and after that, a free screening will happen at XOYO in London on December 2nd.

I really want to get up to XOYO to see it, but looks like essay deadlines and exams are going to stop me making it :( Anyway, yes....the bloke in the pub talking about falling down the stairs is probably my personal favourite...."but I didn't feel a fing".

I'll post some more 12Foot6 stuff in a minute...

Coming Soon - Get Well Soon from 12foot6 on Vimeo.

Snowboard Poster

In my last post I said I'd share the snowboard poster I based the 'Choose a Challenge' one on. As mentioned, it's from a tutorial but I can't find it.

Kind of enjoyed looking at it because it showed me how I've improved over the past nine months or so.

Choose A Challenge

This is a poster I've done recently to publicise an event we are running at Uni.

It's called 'Choose a challenge'. Basically, people can come along and sign up to a challenge from a list of about twelve. I tried to incorporate images that are relevant to the different challenges and am quite pleased with the final result. I mean, it's not the most exciting thing ever, but it serves a purpose and will hopefully catch people's eyes.

The design is based on an old poster I did from a tutorial. I can't find the tutorial, but I'll stick the old poster us as well.

Recent work

Since coming back to Uni in September, I've found myself doing quite a lot of poster designs for a few events.

This is only a quick post as I haven't got long, but I'll be sure to stick some examples up soon :)

Blur

This is something my house-mate, Sam and I spent an afternoon knocking up. It was really fun to make, and my first time having a play with vectors.

It's not perfect and we're unsure what to stick in the middle as opposed to 'blur' but year, here it is.

Oh, I did the top two and he did the bottom two.

CV's

It's been a little while since I last posted (Uni exams and whatnot), but I've been having a little think about CVs.

These past few weeks I've been trying to get myself some work experience with both graphic designers and at ad agencies, but I've been wondering, what does a good creative CV look like?

I had a quick google search a while ago and found all sorts of weird and wonderful ideas for CVs but it seems to me a few are too gimmicky. I'm sure that if you are handing your CV to a creative director then they quite like to see something a bit different, but the reality is that most CVs will have to go through some HR person who's bound to prefer something knocked up on Word.

I'm currently writing mine in Pages. I figure it'll be pretty basic but a bit different from the run of the mill word stuff. But should I make another one, a bit more fancy and exciting? I've seen a few that are fold out things, A3, with everything on it (very poorly explained but see attached photo) and I thought maybe I should make one of these and send it to the relevant people.

Or is it a case of tailoring each CV to suit an individual? The Google Job Experiment certainly got the attention of David Droga and Ian Reichenthal...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FRwCs99DWg

...Starting from...Now.

Hello internet! This is my new blog.

From now on I'll be posting little things that I think are interesting. I'm going to try and keep it focused on things I see that inspire me and bits and bobs that I make.

Enjoy!