Branding Essay

We were asked to write a 3000 word essay on Branding, I'm not keen on writing so this was not fun, I did quite well on the essay despite prior objections. Though my written research could of been better. All in all though, a lot lees painfull than I imagined.

London Day Trip 2

The second time we went down to London in Febuary 2010 was to visit BBDO AMV and Dare. We were given a live brief from AMV for Think!, a government sponsored program to raise road awarenes. We were asked to design an advertising campaign to raise Motorcyclists and Drivers awareness of each other. I designed a pair of TV adverts each in the design of a computer game, each portraying roads from either the cyclists or the drivers point of view but narrating it form the others. The advert was designed to portray that the other person on the road is in fact an actual person and could even by your friend. I did this as most road accidents accour within 7 minutes of the home, so the odds are fairly high of you knowing anybody else involved. I also tried to portray the strengths and weakness of both cars and bikes in the form of game mechanics, for instance motorcyclist tend to be much more aware of the road than drivers, so i showed this as a Radar etc. The Ad was well liked by Phil Martin and Brian Campbell, the creative team that was working on the same brief, though they said I could do with teaming up with a copywriter, just to refine the details and script. I agree, though my undersatnding of copy and strategy is improving, it'll never be my expertise. Their critisisms were much appreciated. AMV were also kind enough to give us all layout pads and pens for free.

In the afternoon we went to see Dare a digital agency. Though we didn't have a brief from them, they did give us some intersting insights into how digital media works, something non of us had really experimented with yet. I found it quite intersesting as a whole.

Visual Communication

One of our modules was on Visual Communication, this was one of my favourite modules because though I'm not the best artist in the world, i think in a very visual way. Due to an over active imagination and a knack for understanding what looks good, normally within seconds of being given an idea, i have hundreds of concepts crossing my mind. For this moldule we were given V05 volumising shampoo to advertise over 3 posters. I designed a campaign based around oceans of hair, ie my three concepts portrayed models each a silhouette of hair filled with either, the ocean, outer space, or the sky. I quite liked the end result, and intend on mac-ing them up for my book later.

Creative Thinking

Our first module in this course was on Creative Thinking. We were asked to look into different styles of thinking, and different ways of looking into things. Not only did we look into Lateral and Critial thinking, two terms coined by Edward de Bono to describe the ways we think, but we looked into methods of making us think differently, or at least harness the thoughts we were having. We were given various exercises to help us in the future when trying to generate ideas. First of which was to find an object for a pound, and think of 50 differnt ways to use it. This exercise was interesting and forced to look at something for more than its standard use. For instance a lighter is used for lighting cigarettes mainly, however it could be used to wedge a door or fight a vampire. The second of our exerices was to write a story in for frames based off a single randomly chosen sentence. My group was given the sentence "Oh my god, I've just eaten my cat", the rules were simple with four pictures and a little text per picture, we had to create a story that included that line. We wrote a story about a loan shark who tricked a late paying loaner in to eating his own cat as a punishment. On top of those exercises we looked into; mind mapping, and a few other tricks to help us out.