Today started with a session from Dan Porter who is a Creative Director of Scriberia, a company which creates visual illustrative minutes of meetings. After learning a bit about the background of Scriberia we had the opportunity to engage with two activities; the first activity was a little bit like Pictionary... we were given 12 words (one at a time) and we had 30 seconds to draw the work, the words varied from "Snag" to "Garage"... it was interesting to see how everyone translated each word into a drawing. The second task we had took a little bit more thinking, we had to draw the shoes of the client we are currently working on a brief for, and then we had to draw the answers to five different questions around the shoes. I quite enjoyed the session, I do not have and talent within illustration.. but I didn't find that it limited my responses to the tasks.
You should check out Scriberia, their work is amazing:
After our talk from Dan we spent time meeting people from the industry and they helped mentor us with our progress in the briefs we've been set. This was incredibly helpful and now I have a final idea which I need to strengthen and prepare a pitch for.
We then all crammed onto the #55 bus and headed over to MPC - Moving Picture Company, these guys are massive! They have three strands: MPC Film, MPC Advertising and MPC Creative. MPC Film has produced the post production work for films such as Harry Potter, Narnia, and Pirates of the Caribbean.. they are also Tim Burton's post-production company of choice... I had the chance to see part of their showreel from 2011.. and it is pretty amazing. MPC Advertising have also post-produced some really great ads for clients such as Cadbury's and Channel 4. MPC Creative are the team behind the Fox's Biscuits adverts, we spent quite a bit of time looking into MPC creative and the character work which they have done.
After the presentation we received a brief and were placed in teams to complete the brief in an hour, our brief was to create a character which would be used to represent "Souper Stars" a new soup company (the soup company doesn't exist, it was invented for the brief). So we set about brainstorming ideas of hamsters, rabbits, the "SOUPer BOWL" and other crazy characters.. but then we settled on the idea of "Brian the Soup Spoon"... Brian is a "Ladles Man" and acts very much like a 40 year old John Cleese (the Basil Faulty era)... he also used to work at the Ritz before going self employed and he now owns the successful "Souper Stars" company.
All the groups then had to pitch back their character to a panel of people from MPC, the best team would win and there was also a runner up... sadly my team didn't win, but we were the runner up! The winners were a team who created a "Diva Bird" who performed to people by the whistling that came out of her lips as she blew over her soup, so a pretty good idea for a character!
The office at MPC was pretty amazing, there was a screening floor in the basement and on the top floor (where we worked on the brief) there was a bar.. and the walls were large glass windows so you could look over some of the London skyline, it was pretty impressive!
#GradAcad
