Hasta La Ideas

This is the PEN Story in stop motion. We shot 60.000 pictures, developed 9.600 prints and shot over 1.800 pictures again. No post production! Thanks to all the stop motion artists who inspired us. We hope you enjoy 🙂

Free download of the music at http://olympus.eu/penstory/

Some of the comments we have read here suggest that we should mention the creator of “A wolf loves pork”, Mr Taijin Takeuchi.
While we were looking for a way to realise a story describing “a journey through time” based on printed images, we were inspired by Mr Takeuchi’s brilliant work. For this reason we intentionally quoted his work in our little movie while showing full respect to his original idea. We didn’t mention his name because we did not want to do so without his prior agreement.
However after considering some of the comments posted here we have decided to add credits to him and his work, which we obviously absolutely love.

Now it seems there’s a bit of controversy going on here regarding the attribution of ideas. Being a creative professional myself I have to claim guilt by inspiration on many a project. Here’s Creative Reviews take on the subject:

In 1937, just as technology was gathering momentum, George Orwell identified one of its fundamental truths. “No one draws water from the well,” he wrote, “when he can run the tap.” As soon as science gives us an easy way of doing something, doing it the old way instantly becomes a hopeless waste of time, in other words, a hobby. Once you can buy factory-built furniture the only reason to fashion a table for yourself is the arts and crafts impulse, and this, he observed, was the preserve of the “bearded fruit juice drinker”. The effect on craftsmanship is permanent. “In such circumstances,” he said, “it is nonsense to talk of ‘creative work’.”

So what is advertising going to do, now that ideas are available on tap,
in every office? Much has been written about the ethics of purloining ideas from YouTube [notably by CR here]. No one has stopped doing it. This isn’t surprising for anyone who’s worked on a nightmare brief. The one that’s been through the agency eight times, the one that comes with an apology from the head of planning, the brief that won’t flush.

The first day is OK, you deflect your partner’s ideas, eliminating the obvious. Even the second day has a kind of hysterical calm, like a test match at gunpoint. It’s the third day, when you’re in the desert, the place where careers are really made or broken, and the review appears at 4pm. Suddenly that clip of a poodle playing a bassoon starts to look so very very right.

It doesn’t just make sense for spineless creatives either. It’s an economic imperative. The problem is there in Orwell’s oxymoron: ‘creative work’. Work that is play. On the one hand advertising is an exercise in waste, an opportunity for brands to engage in that most inefficient of behaviours, entertainment. On the other it’s an industry, a multi-million pound concern, a tough market that promises its clients efficiency. Yes it would be lovely if we could all sit round having ideas, maybe playing a sitar, but if you can get it quicker from the net, you better do it alright?

And this will be fine until clients wise up. The net is accessible to all, so why is a brand going to pay an agency millions of pounds to trawl it for them? That there’s an art to the selection of content is the agency’s last claim to legitimacy. But it’s threadbare. Ditch the agency and how will the brand manager know which clip to choose? He won’t need to. As Bernbach said, research can’t have ideas, but it can certainly help select them. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. It’s us or the computers and for the money men that’s a no-brainer. We don’t have to embrace the future, it’s coming for us like a septic great-aunt.

This article originally appeared in the February issue of CR. ‘Gordon Comstock’ (a pseudonym) is a London-based ad creative who blogs at advertanon.blogspot.com