On a big film kick this week thanks to the festival. Coincidentally the BBC Peter Day's World of Business podcast which I've recently been hooked on, recently did a segment on craft. No, not as in craft services or the things you aunt does. But craftsmanship and skills.
A big part of Peter Day's view (if I recall correctly) is that the benefit of craftsmanship is you have people working in a realm with their fingertips. Not managers or executives, but actual doers. These people have a unique means of problem solving, though many firms overlook this benefit and focus on the "management" side of things.
One of the segments in the show features an interview with a small firm in New Zealand that Peter Jackson hired to do a tremendous amount of models, set and prop work for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. A seven year project. They completed tens of thousands of individual pieces. What was most interesting about this segment is they dove into how Peter Jackson goes about making a film. Even before a frame of film of shot he has meticulously gone through every frame to determine the needs, set a vision, and send it off to the right people. Traditionally in Hollywood they note the segments that require some digital work or special effects and send it off to the agency that works in that realm and it becomes their problem. But, in the end you end up with a special effects segment that feels nothing like the rest of the film.
In the ad agency world, we fall victim to this very fault too often. A creative team is empowered to come up with an idea, but once it goes outside the realm of what they are deemed to be experts in, or the section of the agency they happen to sit in, it no longer is in their hands. Or it gets taken from their hands. Now, this is not necessarily a matter of ego or empowerment , or lack there of, but in the marketing world everyone is so quick to jump on claiming they are one thing or another (I'm TV, or I'm digital, or I'm a designer) that once you have multi channel ideas, you require people from each channel. Thus, you no longer have a creative challenge to solve, but a management/people challenge to solve. Basically, everyone is trying to use the same hammer. One to hit a broadcast nail, one to hit a digital nail, and another to hit a design nail. What if instead, we put in the finger tips on one craftsman (i.e. creative team) a multi-tool and allowed them to problem solve.
now I know this is far from the first time anyone has thought of this, but it was really interesting to me that Peter Jackson found a way from a creative and management perspective to bring his vision to life.
But then again, one could argue he was just empowered to do so.
Following up retro craft week of last week, - was it good for you? It was good for me - I checked out a photography exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery, a small but lately strong collection of shows, on the work of a local Vancouver photographer named Franz Herzog. The best work was from the fifties and sixties chronicling life in Vancouver. I really enjoyed the nostalgia of my hometown from years before my existence. What really struck me was the tremendous amount of advertising clutter that used to exist that today has been cleaned up.
I don't know if this is unique to Vancouver but it put a question as to how pervasive the urban spam problem really is. Don't get me wrong, the last thing the world needs is more crappy ads and logos adorning our streets but undoubtedly there is a happy medium without going as far as Sao Paulo. (Fruits of Imagination directed me to this neat Flickr group of images in past ad Sao Paulo before the billboard structures are removed.) Then again it would be gorgeous (or really drab) to see cities around the world with ads removed.
What will be interesting is to see where the monies and efforts will be invested for ad dollars in Sao Paulo. Will this lead to ever better and more creative TV, Radio and digital advertising. More "digital billboards" on websites and "sponsorships" and logos on everything digital. Will that coin a new term of digital spam.
Who knows, but lets have a party down there and start to find out.
Image courtesy of Equinox Gallery.
It's not all that retro, but still a great bit on special crafts within the business. Couple weeks back Russell wrote a great piece for Campaign on the importance of the people who get things done in an agency. It's a tribute to the "doers." So rare in an industry that primarily only recognizes the "thinkers." But without the doers, not of the thinking gets done!
After visual, the other half of film is of course audio. I remember when I was in like 3rd grad and like most schools periodically there would be a special assembly. This one time some guy showed up with this mega keyboards and synthesizers. So many he was surrounded. Kind of like the Chemical Brothers show here. Just not as cool. Anyways, he went about playing "sounds of the future" to a bunch of kids in a gymnasium. It was a bit odd.
But looking back at those sounds of the future, I actually kind of like them now. In an era when an engineer at an audio studio can pull nearly anything imaginable from a sound bank at his finger tips, there is something interesting in the way synthesizers first worked and the limits of what they could create.
Now, I have never seen an episode of Dr. Who. I think it's a pretty big deal to the Brits. Don't know, but did find this an interesting behind the scenes (before they were called DVD extras) of the making the Dr. Who theme song. Don't know why but those retro sounds, sound a lot cooler to me now.
It's vacation week for this guy. I'll be here, then here for my brother's wedding in Toronto, then here for another wedding the next day in Vancouver, and then here for the last couple days.
And so I've pre-loaded some posts to Key you entertained. Thought is would be a good time to run a theme - therefore I'm calling this the Retro Craft Week.
So often in this business we get so hung up on ""thinking"" and "strategy" and other amorphous globs of information. They are important, but at the end of the day all of this is for nothing if the actual production and creation of the product sucks. The true beauty and wonder of advertising comes to life through production when the creative vision become a creative reality with the cobbled together visions and crafts of a multitude of individuals.
And so, this week we salute these fundamentals. Where ever possible digging into the trenches of history to find out exactly what they are all about.
