Filed under: Experience
My lovely friend Luc asked me for a definition of a creative strategist….and I had this in the cupboard.
The embed from Slideshare doesn’t seem to be working properly you can find it here:
What’s This Creative Strategy Thing All About?
from Wired: Director Guillermo del Toro on the Future of Film
del Toro: In the next 10 years, we’re going to see all the forms of entertainment—film, television, video, games, and print—melding into a single-platform “story engine.” The Model T of this new platform is the PS3. The moment you connect creative output with a public story engine, a narrative can continue over a period of months or years. It’s going to rewrite the rules of fiction.
Wired: It sounds like you’re talking about an entirely new form of storytelling.
del Toro: Think about the way oral tradition became written word—how what we know about Achilles was written many, many years after it made its way around the world with different names and different types of heroes. That can happen when you allow content to keep propagating itself through different kinds of platforms and engines—when you permit it to be retold with a promiscuous form of mythology. You see it when people create their own avatars in games and transfigure their game worlds.
Wired: So how will the public story engine tell those same 10 stories differently?
del Toro: We are used to thinking of stories in a linear way—act one, act two, act three. We’re still on the Aristotelian model. What the digital approach allows you to do is take a tangential and nonlinear model and use it to expand the world. For example: If you’re following Leo Bloom from Ulysses on a certain day and he crosses a street, you can abandon him and follow someone else.
Wired: But these nonlinear, hybrid storytelling forms involve gaming tech, which could trap them in a geek ghetto. What’s going to bring down that wall?
del Toro: Go back a couple of decades to the birth of the graphic novel—I think we can pinpoint the big bang to Will Eisner’s A Contract With God. Today, we have very worthy people doing literary comics. I think the same thing will happen on the Internet-gaming side. In the next 10 years, there will be an earthshaking Citizen Kane of games.
Rosebuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuud!
I love radio. I love the immediacy and the deadline and the wonderful opportunity of telling a story with the human voice. I had my own show for four years and know exactly what track you need to play to make a cup of tea and make a pit stop. But Ira Glass of “This American Life”, can tell you a lot more than I can on how you can know that you are on your way to developing the building blocks of a great story.
To paraphrase:
You start out doing something (like writing, or making films, or painting)
Because you love the form and because you have great taste
And then you start out doing it for your self- and because you have great taste you know that what you’re doing is not good
It’s kinda crappy
It falls shortA lot of people never get past that stage- they quit
Everyone goes through this stage – its totally normal
Sometimes it takes years to get past itThere’s only one way out of it
The most important thing that you can do -is a lot of work
Put yourself on a deadline
Get someone to expect it, to make you create that output
Don’t miss out on his excellent delivery, wonderful self analysis and the end of his story…it’s part of a series.
Filed under: Great Stuff
This educational video helps you understand the mind of a marketer, and what shapes our decision making, workplace behavior and marketing mix.
Can you become a marketer, or are they born? Find the answer you’ve long sought.
Comments on this video youtube:
Thanks. The proven centricity of this situational indicator message allows me to be aware of the performance dashboard metrics to drive my strategy to a larger footprint of the core competency awareness for the client’s customers – in a voracious manner.
Something akin to cultivating ubiquitous methodologies with relation to extending interactive portals – so to speak, scaling killer convergence while proactively seizing viral markets and, with all things being equal, generating revolutionary mindshare. Five out of five!
Filed under: Experience
Gotta love ‘em, those third act twists. They seem to happen all the time in ad land and they’re all the colours of the rainbow: just part of the job, ma’am.
Sometimes I feel that working in fast turnaround high pressure creative communications is a little like being on the stage, tap dancing on ball bearings. The trick is to make it seem effortless, hold your form while keeping a great smile on your face and giving everything you’ve got to keep your grace.
Never, never let a client see you running. One of mine used to say:
When you come home and your house is on fire, the last person you want to see bolting is the fireman.
Good advice. Perception is everything. Turning in circles is probably best avoided too. Especially if someone can see you. Try to keep that stuff on the inside.
There’s no way to theoretically teach someone how to manage the twists. It comes from experience in the trenches- war stories and battle scars are not only great anecdotes and funny after the fact- they are the only medals a professional soldier needs to mark their measure.seriously
When you can play all the roles and have grease paint and a grin and calmness in the face of a fire storm you’ll not only survive the third act, you’ll turn the play from a tragedy into a comedy. And earn yourself some pretty good drinking stories too.
Filed under: Get Friendly
Filed under: Great Stuff
20 of 100 | RECEIPT, 1992: I’m not telling the actual story behind this one… but I kept this receipt from a coffee shop in Kentucky to remind myself to not be an idiot. Doesn’t always work
This is one of the exhibits in Bill Keaggy’s collection of personal archeology projects, this one called 100 pieces of paper and the stories behind them.
Most of his work focuses on the ephemera of others
I’m a collector. But I don’t like to collect rare or expensive items. I like common stuff. It’s all about seeing the beauty in small things forgotten — about getting a glimpse of some tiny, everyday moment that lives on. With these photos, it’s the simple fact that someone was here before you were, and they had something to say. For one reason or another it got said in spray paint, or scratched or scrawled into something. Then it got left behind.
His photograph collections include sad chairs; unspectacular doors of St Louis; random graf public displays of affection :
It’s not so much vandalism as thinking out loud. Well, in many cases it is vandalism. We see these public displays of affection every day. “I love Sue.” “Amber loves Sean.” “Led Zeppelin rules.” We see them so often that they’re easy to ignore.
But the great thing is that when you do notice them, they can set you to thinking. When I see them, I think that if someone’s going to say something for all the world to see, it’s great that they chose to say “I love you”.
I particularly like his haiku generator to describe what’s for dinner, it’s well worth a play.
Filed under: Digital Strategy
The Rodney District contains a highway that leads north of Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city. It’s one of the most dangerous roads in New Zealand and has a rising death toll due specifically to speeders. The message: Slow down.
The agency (Saatchi and Saatchi NZ):
We wanted to prove how violent the force in a crash was, so we had an engineer calculate what a head on collision would be equal to in grenades. At 125 kph it is equal to 10 grenades exploding. To demonstrate this we blew up a car, collected the debris, reconstructed it with 1000’s of pieces of string and invited people to see it. Visitors included the Deputy Mayor, head of police, TV3 news (one of New Zealand’s main news station) and, but most importantly, a surprising number of 18-25 year old males.
