Hasta La Ideas

This year’s Photography Annual included a brand new moving image category, which was judged by the CR editorial staff. Winners in this category included Carl Warner’s animated short for Findus, Adam Hinton’s work for the War Child charity, Dean Chalkley’s documentary ‘Young Souls’, which looks at the contemporary Northern Soul scene, and Dave Young’s ‘Everyone has a story’.

Giles Revell’s Art Revealed project, which was used as an ident for the BBC, was awarded Best In Book.

Revell filmed the entire sequence in a two-and-a-half-foot square water tank, which was set up at modelmaking and special effects company Asylum in London. Describing the process, Revell says, “We tested for a week together. We were lookng for the right materials, inks and pigments that don’t mix so much with water.” The shoot itself took place over the course of a day, during which around ten takes were made, some of which were up to twenty minutes long.

Photographers Agent: Stella Pye, DOP: Graham Stuart, Special Effects: Asylum, Agency: RED BEE Media, Group Creative Director: Frazer Jelleyman, Creative Head: Tony Pipes, Creative: Elie Zaccour, Producer: Deborah Stewart, Editor: Gerry Lindfield

gilesrevell.com

Josh Cole also won Best in Book for ‘In Pieces’, which features Rwanda’s street dancers.

Footage for the video was shot over four days of travelling. Cole says, “Sometimes the performers just danced in the street with no music, sometimes we had a car stereo on.”

Producer: Dicken Marshall Editor: Matt Newman DOP: Luke Jacobs 2nd Camera: Sunil Kupperi Post producer: Kieve Ducharme @ Greyworks Creatives: Jay Marlow and Nils Leonard @ Grey London

joshcole.co.uk

All the elements in Carl Warner’s animated short are made from different foodstuffs.

Post Production by Andrew John Simpson, Model Making by Paul Baker at 3D Studios, Food Styling by Peta O’Brien

carlwarner.com

Adam Hinton’s work for the War Child charity showed interviews with child rape victims that had been helped by the charity. Unfortunately, due to privacy issues we are unable to show you this piece of work.

Directed and filmed by Adam Hinton, Art Directer: Paul Belford, Agency: This is Real Art., Editor: David Freemantle, Client: War Child.

adamhinton.net

Dean Chalkley’s ‘Young Souls’ documentary looked at the contemporary Northern Soul scene. The above is an excerpt, but the full film can be viewed here.

Written, Directed and Produced by Dean Chalkley, Cinematographer Benoit Soler, Editor James W. Griffiths, Sound Design & Mix Mauricio D’Orey, C.A. Smith, Music Consultants, Adrian Croasdell, Jo Wallace, Eddie Piller, Colourist Julien Biard, Casting, Amanda Ashed, Song used in excerpt: Is She In Your Town, written by Curtis Lee, Performed by Curtis Lee, Published by Rockin’ Music, Licensed by Ace Records Ltd.

deanchalkley.com

Dave Young’s ‘Everyone has a story’ features Cynthia – knitter, and member of the West Dorset Accordion Group.

podfilms.tv

CR in Print

Not getting Creative Review in print too? You’re missing out.

In print, Creative Review carries far richer, more in-depth articles than we run here on the blog. This month, for example, we have nine pages on Saul Bass, plus pieces on advertising art buyers, Haddon Sundblom, the illustrator who ensured that Coke will forever be linked with Santa Claus, Postmodernism, Brighton’s new football ground and much more. Plus, it’s our Photography Annual, which means an additional 85 pages of great images, making our November issue almost 200-pages long, the biggest issue of CR for 5 years.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

United Visual Artists have designed the 2011-12 identity for the onedotzero festival. The identity will be used as a trailer and introductory film for onedotzero events, and UVA will also present an installation, titled Horizon, at the BFI Southbank during the festival, which takes place in London from November 23-27.

Shot in an industrial setting using red lazer technology, the identity is reminiscent of UVA’s Speed of Light immersive installation which was staged at the Bargehouse on London’s South Bank last year and commissioned by Virgin Media. According to the press info, the new Horizon installation (which will be shown in November during the festival) will “artificially provide the visitor with a personal horizon”. “Through a narrow slit, data is projected onto the visitor’s retina,” it continues. “A one-dimensional approach to onedotzero’s screen based nature, the work deconstructs the medium to a single scan line.” Sounds fun.

This is the 15th year of onedotzero, a festival that is renowned for showcasing new exciting work in digital and moving image. As ever, this year’s event includes numerous showcases, workshops and panel sessions, along with special feature film previews including screenings of Tatsumi and The Spirit of Apollo. There will also be a special edition of the Bug music video night, showing a retrospective of Björk’s promos. Book quick to get ahead of the crowds at onedotzero.com.

We just received a copy of Walter Isaacson’s official Steve Jobs biography, published today. So naturally we turned straight to the bits concerned with design and advertising…

Jobs’ fanatical attention to detail is well known but is brought sharply into focus in a chapter dealing with Chiat/Day’s Think Different campaign for Apple. Isaacson reveals that, when presented with an early version of the script for the Crazy Ones commercial (above) by a nervous young copywriter, Jobs exploded “This is shit! It’s advertising agency shit and I hate it.”

Jobs ended up writing some of the lines himself. There was also considerable debate over the Think Different line itself and its grammatic sense. Jobs, of course, won that argument.

And then there was the voiceover. According to Isaacson, Jobs and Chiat/Day’s Lee Clow wanted Robin Williams but he wouldn’t do it. Tom Hanks was the next target with Jobs going to the extreme of asking Bill Clinton to phone the actor on his behalf after meeting the ex-President at a fund-raiser. Eventually they settled for Richard Dreyfuss but Clow then suggested Jobs to the voiceover himself. Jobs recorded a version and only plumped for the Dreyfuss one at the very last minute, hours before transmission.

Jobs was even more heavily involved in the print campaign. When told he couldn’t use a certain picture of Gandhi he wanted, Jobs phoned the editor in chief of Time personally to get him to release it. He also phoned the families of Robert Kennedy and Jim Henson to get permissions from them. And to get a specific image of John Lennon he went to New York, to a Japanese restaurant he knew ‘let Yoko Ono know I would be there’ and got her personal agreement.

There’s also quite a bit in the book about Jobs’ relationship with Jonathan Ive, of course, and his commitment to design. At one point Jobs goes so far as to say “If I had a spiritual partner at Apple, it’s Jony”. Before Jobs returned to Apple, Isaacson reveals, engineers would hand over the guts of a machine and expect the designers just to put it all in a box. Under Jobs, design was integral to the entrie process of product development.

It’s remarkable just how much time Jobs and Ive apparently spent together: Isaacson says they would have lunch most days that Jobs was in the office and Jobs would routinely spend afternoons in Ive’s studio looking at models and concepts.

But it was not all sweetness and light: according to Isaacson, Ive “got upset with Jobs for taking too much credit” for some ideas. “It hurts when he takes credit for one of my designs,” Isaacson quotes Ive as saying.

Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson is published by Little, Brown, £25

CR in Print

Thanks for reading the CR Blog but if you’re not also reading the magazine in print, you’re really missing out. Our October issue includes the story of Blackpool’s Comedy Carpet, a profile of Jake Barton whose studio is currently working on the 9/11 Memorial Museum, plus pieces on branding and the art world, guerilla advertising coming of age, Google’s Android logo, Ars Electronica, adland and the riots, and loads more.

And, if you subscribe to CR, you also receive our award-winning Monograph booklet every month for free.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

Steve Jobs, who has died aged 56, was at the heart of a revolution that turned the creative industries upside down. After Apple, our world was never the same again

When I first started at Creative Review, in the mid-90s, we used to hammer out our stories on typewriters. The deputy editor would mark up these ‘galleys’ with typesetting instructions and, every evening, a man would come up on the train from our printer in Brighton, put these sheaves of paper in a leather satchel and take them back to be set. Also in his satchel were the day’s layouts – marked up sheets of paper onto which ‘bromide’ headlines and photocopied columns would be affixed along with transparencies or flat artwork to be scanned. And then came the Mac.

No doubt every one of our readers of a similar vintage – be they designers, art directors, filmmakers, photographers, illustrators or writers – can look back and reflect on their own Apple-driven upheaval not just in how they work but also what they work on. But no matter how old you may be, Steve Jobs will have changed the life of every one of our readers, even those who profess to hate Apple and all it stands for.

Following the advent of the Mac, almost every aspect of the production of visual communications was changed for ever. Of course it wasn’t all down to Jobs: many others helped build Apple and let’s not forget the contributions of Jobs’ contemporaries at the likes of Xerox, Adobe, Aldus, Macromedia, Quark and a host of other start-ups. Crafts such as typesetting, retouching and illustration, previously the domain of highly-trained specialists, were suddenly accessible to all. On one machine, we could design a typeface, retouch an image, create an illustration, layout a poster and edit a film.

But just because we could, it didn’t necessarily mean we should. Thanks to the Mac, designers could do it all – but for no more money and with no more hours in the day. For all the enormous and undoubted benefits that the Mac and the digital revolution it symbolised brought to the creative industries, it has also resulted in the undervaluation of many of the crafts on which it relies. The Mac, the DTP Revolution, whatever you want to call it, drew back the curtain. Now anyone with a computer could set a line of type, design a logo, touch up an image. In every revolution there are winners and losers.

And yet would anyone want to go back to those pre-Mac days? Creative Review readers are, in the main, Apple people. We stuck by Apple in the dark days of the clones before Steve (and a certain Jonathan Ive) returned to lead us (by the wallet) into the sunny uplands of the iWorld. We had Macs, the suits had PCs: they symbolised the great divide. They were ‘ours’ and, despite their faults, we loved them. Before iTunes and iPods, before the phones and the pads, we embraced Apple and we never let it go.

As TBWA Chiat Day’s famous campaign had it, with an Apple Mac you could ‘Think Different’. Such innate understanding of the power of his brand is perhaps the other reason why Jobs was held in such high regard by our industry.

It has often been said that Apple is not a technology company but a design company. It redesigned the way we live and gave us the tools to do it. Its products were not just the best looking but also offered the best user experience. The interfaces, the materials, even the boxes the products came in were leagues ahead of the competition, as was the advertising.

Jobs and Apple created their own exquisitely designed universe. As a result he will be remembered not just as the man at the heart of revolutionising the creative industries but also perhaps as its ideal client: a man in charge of one of the world’s biggest companies who understood the power of what we do, invested in it and championed it.

He got it. And he got us.

A female TV reporter falls under the spell of the ‘Lynx Effect’ thanks to the use of ‘shortcut scrubbing’ to play around with the action in a laddish YouTube video

If users click on the YouTube progress bar and press the keys 5, 7, 3, 8, lo and behold, the femal reporter …. well try it for yourself. Agency Razorfish is claiming that this is the first time that the ‘shortcut scrubbing’ technique has been used in an ad.

It may not be the most edifying piece of content you’ll ever find on CR, and we apologise if any readers are offended, but it will no doubt prove a hit with Lynx’s adolescent target market.

CR in Print

Thanks for reading the CR Blog but if you’re not also reading the magazine in print, you’re really missing out. Our October issue includes the story of Blackpool’s Comedy Carpet, a profile of Jake Barton whose studio is currently working on the 9/11 Memorial Museum, plus pieces on branding and the art world, guerilla advertising coming of age, Google’s Android logo, Ars Electronica, adland and the riots, and loads more.

And, if you subscribe to CR, you also receive our award-winning Monograph booklet every month for free.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.