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Down in the basement you don't get much of a view, just a brick wall and dumped rubbish, but this morning we found these. I find the whole thing so intriguing; Who are these people? Who threw the photos away? Why? We've just spent the last half hour making up our own stories of who they are and how they came to be there.
Things are so much more engaging when you don't have the complete picture but just enough to fire the imagination.
Saw this quote over at Ben's blog this morning and have decided we should stick it on our powerpoint presentations from now on. Apparently, it came from those smart guys at base camp
Maybe it's because I'm a copywriter, but I love quotes. If for no other reason than, they are a fantastic reminder that even in today's 'visual world' well-crafted words still have the power to resonate in a profound way.
So it used to concern me that when I met today's student teams and asked them what they were you got the same reply from both, we're creatives. Ask them how that works and who's going to write any words that are needed and you usually get something along the lines of; both of us, whoever's less busy, or the all encompassing, dunno haven't thought about it.
Digging a little deeper I discovered that all the major ad courses; St.Martins, Bucks etc. don't teach writing or art direction as a skill. They teach the creation of ideas.
All of which used to deeply trouble me. A lot.
But it doesn't anymore, because I was wrong and they are right (well, up to a point, it's the industry that's creative, not a person nor a department, but that's for another time.)
I was being lazy in my thinking. Why are we asking people to articulate an idea in a particular medium and then once they have, expect those very same people to craft it all the way through? The answer is, for no other reason than because that's how it's always been done. And that's no answer at all.
At Here Be Monsters, we're experimenting with a whole new structure, one that plays to individuals strengths and is loosely based on my experience of writing for Hollywood, where someone has an idea, another person writes it, another rewrites the funny bits, yet another rewrites the female voice etc. and it's all done under the watchful eye of someone (usually a producer) who has a very clear vision of what they want to achieve at the end of it.
And so if the solution to our client's problem requires written words we employ dedicated writers, people who feel the need to write; TV writers, comedy writers, script writers, copywriters, novelist and journalists to write them for us.
As I'm forever saying, now is the time for us to experiment.
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