Hasta La Ideas

There are some great music videos around at the moment – here’s some of our favourites. First up is one for cat lovers: the new video for Best Coast track Crazy For You, directed by Bob Harlow of production company Somesuch & Co.

Also from Somesuch & Co is Daniel Wolfe‘s latest, for Stay The Same by The Shoes. The narrative-led promo stars This Is England ’86’s Johnny Harris and follows other impressive films by Wolfe for Plan B and Chase & Status. It seems only a matter of time before he will be directing longer format pieces.

Next up is another gritty, though beautifully shot piece of narrative film for you, this time from director Oliver Goodrum, for Casually Sunshine’s latest track Consequences of the Kill.

Director Price James channels early 90s cable TV channels (complete with terrible ads) in this video for Hercules & Love Affair’s track My House.

This cinematic video, set in a US Pentecostal church, is by director Dan Sully for Chapel Club’s new song, Surfacing. Production company: Love.

Finally we end with this truly bizarre little film from directors Larry Seftel and David Day for track We’ll See To Your Breakdown by The Chap. If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you combine an overweight chap with a wind machine, then this is the film for you. And, as if that weren’t enough, his stomach has been turned into a comedy character. Nice.

With hundreds of channels on the EPG, television can be a very crowded place these days. Discovery Networks’ UK ECD Federico Gaggio talked to CR about the challenges for designers working on TV and the latest Discovery ‘refresh’

Ever since Lambie-Nairn virtually invented the idea of broadcast branding on British TV in the 80s, things have become steadily more complex for anyone with a non-terrestrial subscription and, by extension, for the designers working on those channels. Not only are there multiple channels competing in similar areas – music, factual, comedy etc – but those channels may even be showing the same content. US science geek sitcom Big Bang Theory, for example, can currently be found both on E4 and Warner.

TV designers have to cope with both practical issues – how do viewers know what channel they’re on? – and branding issues – how do we establish a clear tone of voice amid all this clutter? Under Federico Gaggio’s creative direction, Discovery has fared better than most, utilising an impressive list of collaborators including Spin, Devilfish, Brothers and Sisters and Red Bee to pick up a host of Promax awards in recent years, but the challenges have been considerable. “It used to be a lot easier,” Gaggio admits. “Discovery was the first in that factual space which meant it didn’t need to make an effort in order to be found.”

Now, it must compete with the likes of National Geographic, the History Channel and a host of others. And because of the sequential nature of Electronic Programme Guides, with viewers flicking up and down the lists of grouped, similar content, many think they are viewing a Discovery channel when in fact they are watching a rival, he says. Things have been further clouded by the endless sub-channels that have proliferated recently – Discovery now has 13 channels including Discovery History and Discovery Science.

“Your success in creating loyalty depends on how well you deliver your branding,” Gaggio says. “People search for content but they do it in places that they feel an affinity with. If you can establish an emotional connection with your audience it might mean they will pay attention when you propose content: if that same content is on another channel, they won’t pay attention to it.”

Discovery History promo created with Brothers and Sisters

The prime tool for doing that is via idents which can fulfil that dual role of station identification and brand building. Discovery has previously based its idents around one of its key attributes – the fact that it makes its own content and has recognisable ‘stars’ such as Bear Grylls.

“We went down the route of focussing more on our content and making the association between the brand and its content clear,” Gaggio says. “We did that by getting rid of abstract idents and using the content as a branding device via show intros which featured a still of the show concerned – they were very useful for people using PVRs because when you are fast-forwarding you would know when to stop. It created a very effective package in terms of navigation and was very clear but became a bit cold and detached. We went a bit overboard, people might have missed visual presence of brand,” he admits.

Design and production: DoubleG Studios with Discovery UK Creative

In a ‘refresh’ from Grant Gilbert’s Double G Studios and Dixon Baxi, Discovery has sought to tackle this by introducing a new branding device – placing content from the shows within the globe of the networks’ logo and creating an abbreviated form of the logo using just the initial D of Discovery.

Design and production: DoubleG Studios with Discovery UK Creative

“We did a four-way pitch [for the refresh] and everyone came up with the same idea of putting content into the globe,” Gaggio says. “We’d always treated it as sacred before but it’s great to have a simpler symbol which we are now able to play with much more.”

Design and production: DoubleG Studios with Discovery UK Creative

See more from Discovery UK Creative here

It’s grey and wet here in London today, and it’s officially the most miserable day of the year, known as Blue Monday. But, thanks to independent initiative Smile For London, there are some cheery, non-commercial visuals to counter the gloom being beamed onto various central London Tube platforms during rush hour all this week and next…

Regular readers may recall that we blogged the call for entries to Smile For London back in October last year. Submissions were to be 20 seconds long and the brief was simple: make people smile. A jury comprising Jeremy Boxer of Vimeo, Neville Brody of Research Studios, Shane Walter of onedotzero, author Stephen Bayley, and CR’s Gavin Lucas each selected their five favourite submissions and it is this selection that is screening over the week on the various CBS Outdoor projection screens on selected Tube platforms.

A host of established artists and film makers – including Airside, Aardman Animation, Jon Burgerman (still from Smile, shown above), Pete Fowler and Saam Farahmand – were also invited to create new work specially for the project and these new short pieces will also be screened.

“This is a hugely exciting project for us, say Smile for London co-creators Jo Kotas and Alex Stevens. “We want to celebrate the creative talents of our city and at the same brighten the journeys of London’s commuters. Our ambition is for the project to gain real momentum and become a permanent London fixture.”

Here are a couple of our favourite submitted films. First up is Spreadsheet Invasion, the winning student entry by 22 year old Amy Thornley,  currently in her final year studying Interactive Design at the University of Lincoln. It was animated frame by frame in Excel:

Spreadsheet Invasion from Amy Thornley on Vimeo.

Urban Animal by 12Foot6:

Urban Animal from 12foot6 on Vimeo.

How Snow Is Made by Amael Isnard:

How snow is made from Amael Isnard on Vimeo.

Balloon by Liam Brazier:

Balloon (for Smile for London) from Liam Brazier on Vimeo.

The screenings via the CBS Outdoor projectors on Tube platforms will be shown at the following London Underground stations:  Camden Town, Euston, Holborn, Liverpool Street, Moorgate, Oxford Circus, Paddington, Piccadilly Circus, Victoria and Waterloo. More info about the project at smileforlondon.com

We’re making a couple of changes to The Annual this year, including the introduction of a prize for the Client of the Year

The CR Annual Client of the Year will be awarded by the CR editorial team in order to recognise a client or client organisation that has, in our opinion, commissioned the outstanding work of the year as featured in the CR Annual.

Creative Review’s Annual has, in previous years, awarded a CR Annual Ad Agency of the Year and a CR Annual Design Studio of the Year. In the past we have done this along the lines of the Palme D’Or at Cannes – the winner being the Agency or Studio with the most pieces of work accepted into the Annual that year.

We’re going to alter the criteria this year: both the CR Annual Agency and Design Studio of the Year will be chosen by the CR editorial team. Anyone entering work to The Annual qualifies.

All work chosen for the Creative Review Annual will be featured in our special double May issue. If you would like to enter, please go here. Extended deadline: Friday January 14

The latest interactive video for Japanese band Sour reflects two big trends from this year: multiple pop-up windows and music videos that pull in the user’s personal data

Last year, Sour scored a big hit with their Hibi No Niero video which used fans’ webcam footage to charming effect. The new video, for track Mirror, echoes Arcade Fire’s The Wilderness Downtown in that it takes the user’s personal details (in this case Facebook, Webcam and Twitter) in order to create a personalised, multi-window experience.

Go to the site and you are asked to input your log-in details to Facebook, webcam and Twitter.

The video then starts by appearing to do a Google search on you (or CR in this case).

It then uses the images it finds for you to construct a kind of tiled walking man who wanders across your website, Wikipedia or other related pages, before ending up at Twitter.

A new tiled man then appears, made up of images of Sour’s singer, who begins to walk across the Google Maps page for your location

Various band members then appear in pop-up windows

The video then brings in webcam footage to create tiled images of the band playing

Here’s a demo video of the whole thing working:

It’s a beautifully done experience, even though many of its various elements have been seen before, for example in the Arcade Fire piece mentioned above, in Paul Kamuf‘s Light as a Feather film (Kamuf is featured in the Jan issue of CR out this week) or in various ‘upload your webcam footage’ composite projects. Nevertheless, Masashi Kawamura, a creative director at Wieden + Kennedy New York and his fellow directors Qanta Shimizu and Saqoosha have combined those elements and more to entertaining and absorbing effect.