My work - British Acupuncture Council

A little spec work I produced at the School of Communication Arts with Olly to promote acupuncture. The brief was to demystify it and make it more accessible for a western audience.

Probably not something the client would ever buy in real life. In fact, they can't really do advertising at all, because they, you know, basically sell a lie. But never mind, here we go...

My Work - spec Barnado's copy

This was a copywriting challenge at the School today - to come up with words for a Barnardo's advert to go with the image. The image was from BBH's "fuck off" print ad, but we didn't know this until after we'd produced our version.

This is mine. Note that the Art Direction is mine, i.e. very shoddy, so just concentrate on the words.

(click to see full size)

My work - Toyota Auris Hybrid

Here's a little spec work I produced at school with my parter Olly Wood.

There's definitely room for improvement. I think the fantasy idea can be made more dramatic and exciting in the actual ads, though that's partly down to execution. We also need to make sure they're not too similar to a couple of ads that are already out there. But generally I'm happy with the creative strategy and think this one could end up in the end-of-year portfolio.

"Third World Debt" project

Here's a little project I produced as one half of Molly to promote taking action over debt in poor countries.

SCA 2.0 half term assignment pt.4

Well bloody hell, here it is, Sunday night, then once more unto the breach, dear friends.

I did have a listen to 3 albums that I normally wouldn't, although to be fair I wasn't always concentrating on them that much.

1. "Missundaztood" by Pink

Taken from Mrs Cutcopywrite's CD collection, I did already know a couple of tracks, like "Get the party starte" and "Just Like A Pill", but the rest was a mystery. Strangely, even the tracks I knew had a really dated, anaemic production, neither pop nor rock, that was all drums and vocals and nothing in between. We're used to big bass and ravey synths all over our music these days, and despite a spirited perfomance from the woman, I can't imagine, for example, ever using it in an advert. One of those things that sounds better in your memory.

2. "Happy Hardcore Top 100 Best Ever" by Various Artists

This was, er, fast. It brought back happy memories of Technohead's "I want to be a hippy", in which Top Of The Pops would censor the word "marijuana" but not the phrase "I want to get high". There were odd moments where I'd recognise a sample, or where a nifty rave riff would appear for a bit, but mostly it just highlighted how much dance music has moved on, and with genres like dubstep and artists like Major Lazer around, going faster and faster (happy hardcore runs at 160-180bpm) just seems silly.

It's fair to say that of the three, this is the CD that caused Mrs Cutcopywrite the most aggravation.

3. "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill", by Lauryn Hill

I enjoyed this. It's not my thing entirely, but sales and critical acclaim were so high that you can't help but take notice. I could have done without the strange educational spoken word parts, but otherwise, it was a great album lyrically and musically.

Right, now for a good night's sleep. Possibly.

SCA 2.0 half term assignment pt.3

Right, as promised, I started reading "Quest - Journey to the Centre of your Soul".

Then I stopped. Sorry, but I just couldn't take it any more. It's the usual New Age logic gap. Yes, there is probably great personal benefit from spending a day in silence, or camping out in nature on your own, or sitting in an empty room without distractions for a period of time. But you can see that benefit without linking it to Native American rituals, or attaching some kind of cosmic significance.

Time alone = time to think = time to reflect = a chance to make decisions and come to answers. It's as simple as that. But it gets surrounded by this self-important, meaningless "spiritual" bollocks.

Take room purifying, for instance. I will just about accept that the aroma created by burning sage may have some relaxing or calming properties. But I won't accept that it will "cleanse the energy", because energy is a complicated scientific concept and not something you can spray with Dettol, and neither will I accept that it is necessary to use a feather to waft the smoke around. Why not anything else? What difference does it make? If I wafted it around with a copy of Mein Kampf, and then invited her into the room to examine "the energy", would she be able to tell?

Furthermore, why do they always pick the acceptable parts of tribal rituals? She talks about how young adolescents from Native American tribes go on a Quest to reach adulthood, and prescribes it for her own children. But then, the coming of age rituals of boys in the Sambia tribe of Papua New Guinea would involve inserting sharpened sticks into their nostrils until blood gushed out, and encouraging them to fellate as many bachelors in the tribe as possible, and swallow as much semen as possible, over a period of 5 days. Perhaps Ms Linn would like to include this "Quest" in her next book?

Anyway, I feel a bit guilty for not getting through it all, so I'm going to listen to an album of Happy Hardcore to make a start on part 4.

SCA 2.0 half term assignment pt.1

Over half term this week, we have to do the following:

- watch a film we would never normally watch
- read 2 magazines we would never normally read
- read a book we would never normally read
- listen to 3 albums from a genre we would never normally listen to.

As of today, it's one down, three to go, having read my two magazines. Magazine number one: BBC Top Of The Pops.

From this, I learned that:
- Horoscopes in teen mags are basically behavioural engineering. A typical one runs "your parents are tired, so why not help them out with chores?" or "there's a new girl at school who's feeling left out, why not make friends with her?"
- The word "cringe" is now a noun as well as a verb, as in "I had a complete cringe in front of this boy I like"
- It is acceptable in such mags to describe the pre-pubescent mini-Bieber, Ronan Parke, with the word "yum"
- Teenage girls like One Direction. This cannot be overstated. They're on just about every page of it, including the page telling you what's in the magazine next issue.
- Slashfic* is the underlying psychological driver behind teen fandom. In this case it's a kind of platonic slash-lite, but it's notable how many of the questions asked of the various boys involve friendship, hugs, togetherness, and brotherhood. Typical enquiry to One Direction: "How much do you love each other out of 100 per cent?"**
- The free bottles of nail polish and stick on jewellery are harder to apply than they look; it's probably something to do with a group of friends at a sleepover. Here's my attempt, with The Wanted looking disapprovingly on:

* This is slashfic, if you weren't aware.
** As opposed to "out of 75 per cent", one assumes.

Magazine number two: Love It!

This really was a horrendous, downmarket, prurient, depressing piece of filth. On the one hand they have horror stories about cosmetic eye surgery, on the other they offer, with no apparent irony, breast reduction as a competition prize. We have a single Mum whose way of finding personal redemption from her disfiguring burn scar is to work nights in a strip club, private dances included. Apparently men jizzing in their pants as she rubbed her vagina against their trousers made her "feel good about [her]self". There's some half-arsed analysis of celebrity couples' body language, deciding from a single photo that Fearne Cotton's boyfriend has doubts about his relationship. The embarrassing photos sent in by readers are simply not funny or remarkable in any way, and the captions added by the subs added nothing witty or charming.

I could go on, but I won't. I know there's downmarket, but this is just hideous.

Tune in tomorrow when I'll be watching Tina Fey's 2008 film "Baby Mama". Apparently it's a comedy.

Half Term at SCA (and earphone scamps)

Or "no rest for the wicked", as it should be subtitled. We've still got a lot to do, and I've got a bit extra as I'm doing some freelance work producing web copy for one of our mentors. But there should still be time for a little rest, with a bit of luck.

In the latter part of the first half term we finally started producing ads. The first brief was a bit of an odd one, and a difficult one for me - we had to produce a government campaign to get people to turn down or take off their earphones, with posters on the tube and on buses. Difficult for me because I depend on them while travelling for my sanity, and because I know that they're well insulated and the sound doesn't leak to the outside world.

Anyway, working with the splendid Katie Harland, we came to the conclusion that lecturing people about health risks or antisocial behaviour would largely be ignored. Therefore we needed to engage and amuse, and get the message across to people with a little subtlety. We did this by suggesting weird and wonderful conversation snippets that you might overhear if you took your headphones out.

First example, which also gives an idea of the typography:

Next example as a scamp, with added pay-off line and the tagline ("Unplug Your Lugs") buried in the web address.

Final example, with some extra words to make it clearer that it's referring to what you might hear in the carriage. I think another team, who had basically the same idea as us, had a better solution, which was to give each quote a date, time, and tube line where it was supposedly (or actually) heard. I think ours was a little clumsy by comparison, though naturally I preferred our quotes...

I had a lovely idea for a hard-hitting poster based on the insight another team had about tinnitus sufferers being likely to commit suicide. It would feature earphones in the shape of a noose, and the words "Tinnitus leads many sufferers to suicide. So it's not just the other passengers you're driving mad. Turn it down". Unfortunately, the suicide thing is a complete myth, but it would have been nice.

SCA 2.0 work: G-Wiz brief

One of the purposes of this blog is to post work that I've been doing for my course at the School of Communication Arts - not just to show anyone interested, but actually to have a record of work completed for evaluation purposes. It's all a far cry from the exam papers and bound dissertations I'm used to, but what the hell, let's go with it.

To help us understand the process of writing a Creative Brief, we were... asked to write one, by Patrick Collister of Creative Matters. This is what my team produced.

Click here to download the document.