APOLOGY BRIEF

This brief was to apologize for an inanimate object we would probably never EVER have to apologize for. If you can do that, you can do anything! I had to apologize for slippers, so chose the view point of: Slippers are bad for your health and restrict your bone movement when you walk - so saying sorry for the destruction of your feet.

LIVE BRIEF: MARMITE

Okay, so im helping a few second years out with one of their live briefs, they are on the Buisness side of advertising and have asked me to be their Creative and come up with ideas and concepts. This brief is for Mindshare to promote the product Marmite, iv got quite a few ideas, and with a budget of £5million anythings possible! Everyone already knows the slogan "you either love it or you hate it", but i wanted to go for a different slant on it. Demographic: current users/early twenties.

My first idea involves the well known game of Russian Roulette - the loser gets the shot of Marmite.

My next idea involves the summertime, everyone loves a good water fight or a well aimed flour bomb yes? Why not make this the best summer yet and mix a few Marmite bombs up in it! Inviting anyone and everyone to the event, builds a sense of community among the lovers AND the haters.
How about growing plants in its nutritious goodness?
Or come up with 100 different uses. They could also open this to the public, so people who have other ideas can post them up on a website.
Have you heard the myth where people smear peanut butter on the roof of their pets mouth to keep them busy? Why not try Marmite?
An advert idea to get an employee out of a day at work - their butter is contaminated with remnants of butter, so they ring up work apologizing for not being able to come into work for having a "fungal infection".

HAPPY MOTHERS DAY

Its mothers day. BUT also Easter soon! So i posted my mums present with an army of easter chickens on the inside.

PROMOTE A SHIT JOB - VIA DIRECT MAIL

Each person was given a different job. I was given "Tele-sales". During this period i learnt a lot about the lives of employees, i went to the nearest one in Wycombe and interviewed the manager, even got offered a job in the process, but i couldn't find a specific reason for someone to WANT to do the job, as most people dislike them. I started off on a sarcastic tangent, coming up with this video to try set the scene.

But the more i thought about it, and worked it, it just didnt flow, and i couldn't promote it. So back to the drawing board. I wrote before "most people dislike them", which means a small portion of the world does, i came to the conclusion it is mainly lonely people who haven't got anyone to talk to appreciate them the most. This opened my group up to: old people, people who have been bullied, victims of domestic violence.

I found Domestic Violence the most interesting, so my tele-sales people are undercover DV's from the well know charity Woman's Aid. Their purpose is to ring up the houses, and if many of the symptoms are recognized from the phone call then steps will be taken. That is step one.

Now, i had to bring Direct Mail into this (Direct Mail is more formally known as junk mail, but done well it can be very effective. Most people don't like DM as they get a shit load of leaflets through there door -not as many these days as company's are trying to be "greener"), so i have chosen to send post cards to the people we fear may be victims of Domestic Violence. Postcards are pretty much non-traceable as you don't write a return address, they will have foreign post marks, and addressed to a different person than the abused.

They will have subtle tips and hints, and just a friendly voice to make them know they are not alone. If they come to a point when they want to escape, that is what they are for.

The theory is, as there is no return address, it will just be lying round the house until it is put in the bin. A post card addressed to someone else looks like a mistake so it doesn't matter how many you send, its not an automatic assumption it is for someone in the household. Post cards are step two.

Iv also thought about sending undercover telesales workers as door-to-door-sales-people as well, for example, someone could go to the house (and as an excuse) say "for having requested a survey to have a conservatory in the garden". Which is step three.

TRACKING

This was to do with tracking somone down who you dont know anything about apart from where they work. We had to track down an "ex Bucks student", who used to be on my advertising course a few years ago. It could be a man, or a woman, they could be a secretary or the creative director, they might not even work there any more! So. We were each given an agencey, the weekend and our heads to try track down our person. Lots of people found theirs on the agency websites, i wasn't so lucky. Even after internet stalking, a trip to the Agency, a blagging past 2 receptionists, and an almost-street take over with a couple of posters i still wasn't any wiser...

ROOM PERVING

Since starting advertising, i feel a lot of my projects are to do with perving on people. I think the technical term is "getting an insight", but when your told to go into someones room you don't know, go through their draws looking at their belongings and make assumptions on their lifestyle and background.. Then i think im justified to to call it perving:)

BOREDOM IN HALLS

Halls get a bit boring sometimes, i think its really nice when people put themselves out there to make life more interesting (some might call it annoying) for other people. I decided to make a string maze for my flatmate's to enjoy -weirdly they didn't really appreciate it..

The view from my room.

General view down the corridor

FLOWER POWER

So i spent my Christmas working in a florists, it was brilliant! I started off making grave posiesWorking my way onto bunches of flowers

Then onto dressing the outside of the shop

FACIAL EXPRESSIONS

This project was simply noting the change in facial expressions after some form of "action", be it reading a passage or listening to a piece of music. I gave my victims sour sweets, the "Toxic Waste" ones. It was brilliant!:)

LIVE BRIEF: SMART CARS

We recieved this project from the company Weapon7. It was a Live Brief so an actual on-going project that the company itsself was doing. The main focus was to get people INTO the smart cars, make the test drive more enjoyable but not necessarily to buy them. They currently appeal more to "green" people, or older people and the company asked us to target a younger audiance: younger couples, spontaneous, ready for excitement.

The main idea we pitched was a Smart Art gallery. We would get up-and-coming new artists to design and do the art work on a few cars, do exhibitions at various places around the UK at racing stadiums or empty airhangers and allow the public who had come to view the exhibition to test drive the cars on the land around the exhibition, as fast or as slow as the wanted, experimenting with the steering, breaks etc. We did research into destinations, artists and talked to members of the public.

I came up with an alternative idea again appealing to the same "spontaneous" and "youthful" market, just from a different angle. My idea was a more adrenalin-fueled experience for a test drive. In the same way we have "extream sports" i decided to address the cars as people thinking how you could excite them and push them to the limits:
I thought about: skiing, wind surfing, zorbing, snowboarding, free running, surfing, skate boarding, parachuting and cross-country races. From my drawing above you can see i used the first three ideas. We were told not to think how possible it would actually be, and not to think about the money it would take to make, the concept was the important part.

£1 BRIEF

This project is all about the value of a product -be it a monetary value, sentimental value, quality of the product, potential, or relatively in regards to other products. We were ordered to go on a trip to the 99p Store to find an object of little worth to try transform into something for a greater value. In my pair, we chose big thick marker pens. Coming up with the name tag of P.E.N (Permanently Expressing the Nation). We went down the theme of self expression, by displaying one of your greatest secrets you aren't as bothered about minor things such as: not having the latest trainers, your hair being out of place, having forgot to put your make-up on. Unimportant things. Its a way of breaking barriers down between people, insecurities are lowered making you feel more comfortable.
We went for a colour-coded system, the red ink on the top line is the "life update" for how you are feeling at that moment in time, and the bottom line is the secret. The greater the secret, the better you feel about yourself. I made one with the life update saying "CHIPPER" and the secret "I HAVE AIDS" and wore it for a day before we presented this. Even though it wasn't true, i felt quite liberated for the sheer fact i had done it.

We made this into an underground campaign, telling the story of how we had managed to conquer London and making our way up to country, us being representatives of P.E.N and coming to High Wycombe to recruit more P.E.N'ys.

We made an underground-recruitment video where we put up posters all around Wycombe (as far as i know, Cineworld still is still sporting our sign!).

..THE P.E.N REVOLUTION HAS BEGUN!

CHARACTOR BRIEF

For these 3 weeks, my work revolved around stalking people. Basically. I was given a piece of music to listen to (mine was Beethoven's third symphony in D) and i had to make my own starting point from there about a charactor. I started off by following people into shops, sitting on benches while people had conversations, i started talking to people in town, took long public transport trips, the list is endless! I had to create the essence of a new character, by combining qualities of people i had seen.

What really struck me about people in Wycombe is the lack of eye contact they make, back up North people actually look at you. So i started looking into mental disabilities settling with Asperges Syndrome. From here, i put my character together:

Joseph is a reserved boy who was diagnosed with Asperges Syndrome when he was 6 years old. A social misfit who finds it hard to communicate with peers his own age. His favorite subjects are: Biology, chemistry, physics and maths - pure logic. He has a scientific mind so the answers are either "right" or "wrong". In his own time he collects insects in jars to study them, write up conclusions and start his research again to find anomalies.

People don't always understand him, they call him "wierd" or a "freak" or "sadistic". An extream introvert, he doesnt like to express himself through his clothes, music, hair or speech. His one confidence is his councillor he meets up with weekly - she suggested him listening to classical music (my tie-in with Beethoven) in order to relax. He is not physically fit, fairly overweight, which contributes to making him feel excluded from peer groups. He likes to know what is going on, so constantly looks around and fidgets.

All the jars contained different insects and 'experiments'.

House spiders
Woodlice
Garden snails

WORD BRIEF: TETE A TETE

Ok, so this was my first proper brief i have done whilst at Bucks New university. I was given the word "tete a tete" which is a french word literally meaning "head to head", referring to a private conversation or argument. The main aim of this was to see how far i could push the word to get it away from the original meaning. It was all about how i interpreted the word, regardless of whether it makes sense to other people. All planning was done on wallpaper, so it was easier to write and write and write without having to use lots of different pieces of paper to lose.One of my ideas was to make a piece of music. The word "tete" has a beat to it, making it very steady. As i play guitar i wrote a piece of music incorporating this beat, combining the strings and the hitting the base like a drum -but iv got no idea how to upload it to Blogger!

I looked at animal greetings and how they differ from human greetings. What really stuck out to me, is how they use there sense of smell so sniff each others bottom to pick up information. If a human was to walk around smelling someones bottom it would probably get reported to the police and you would be reported for GBH!

Next i moved onto different ways of saying the word. Depending on how you pronounce the word "tete" it comes out like "teat", and as i have "tete a tete" (2x tete) i automatically thought of a double uddered-cow. Going on to think about: what would happen if the body was then split into two (as they have 4 stomachs anyway, that would be 8), and two sides of things (good/evil. Black/white. Up/down), twins, triplets, doubles, mythical beasts etc.
Now we have the introduction on mobile phones we dont talk head to head, its "head to phone", but with the introduction of texting we no longer even speak to people. it is as though we have taken our own voice away from ourselfs -a form or self-dehumanisation. This reminded me of world war2 where Hitler singled out the Jews with the yellow star of David, and gay people with a pink triangle, taking away there rights and gradually there lives. I came up with my own symbol for people with mobile phones, a red O on a badge to pin on yourself. I chose the shape "O" because it symbolised the persons mouth being taken away from them, and the colour red connotes lots of things: danger, anger, stop.
This final idea is a spin-off of the previous idea (mobile phones). The idea that we communicate with our hands now we have mobile phones. I drew up lots of different ways of showing this, including the alphabet on each section of a finger, "smiley's"/"emotions" on each finger, send/receive buttons on your thumb. I finally came to the conclusion of: by texting with both hands we feel comfortable, so taking away one of our hands we don't feel right, but texting is something that isnt natural and isnt initially comfortable. My final outcome was a single hand with half a smiley face on it to show how we are unable to communicate properly. I played with fake blood to show the physical damage we are doing to ourselves.

STICKERS

I made stickers! They were meant to go with my "zombie project", but i got a bit happy with them and stuck them everywhere:) It was a fairly long process, i had to make the stamp to start with. Make sure the words are backwards to come out forwads:
OFFICIAL ZOMBIE TRACKER

I made A4 sheets of them

Then got a bit too happy with them:)

ZOMBIES ARE MY HOME BOYS

ZOMBIE AID logo

I LOVE ZOMBIES