version3.0

It occurred to me that my original post about SP09 was a little bit dry. OK, super dry. I tried to sum up 2 days of amazing visual inspiration with a whole lot of words. It was Sunday when I wrote it.

So, in an effort to rectify this, here are some of the coolest moving image things that caught my attention at Semi-Permanent09:

Trailer for STUDIOaka’s animated adaptation of children’s book Lost & Found by Oliver Jeffers

Definitely going to check this out when I get a chance. A beautiful story animated in a lovely way. Had a chance to chat to STUDIOaka’s Phillip Hunt (the director) over dinner on Friday night and his passion for animation and humility was super cool.

Trailer for STUDIOaka’s animated adaptation of picture book Varmints

Another amazing looking animated short film from STUIDOaka. This trailer almost had the audience choked up, so I am sure that this will be a tear jerker.

Music video for Simian Mobile Disco – Synthesise (co-directed by Kate Moross)

Banging music vid from Kate Moross that had the auditorium rocking. Super simple idea, that is perfectly executed and captures the energy of the tune so perfectly. Awesome throw back to warehouse rave days.

Music video for Simian Mobile Disco – Audacity of Huge (co-directed by Kate Moross)

Another vid for SMD which is a literal visual interpretation of the lyrics of the tune. Love the bright colours and not-so-seriousness of it.

Music video for Clark – Ted by 1stAveMachine

Dark video for a dark tune. Apparently some people have trouble seeing which parts of this are real filmed insects, and which parts have been added digitally in post. These people have a frightening concept of what insects really look like close up.

Promotional propaganda video for 1stAveMachine

Neat little propaganda piece done to promote 1stAveMachine when they first set up.

Alexia Sinclair compresses 4 days of work into a 4 minute video

An amazing insight into the painstaking process that Alexia goes through in creating her incredible images.

There was so much more awesomeness, but this was the stuff I could track down easily online. After all, I am a little bit lazy. You’ll just have to go along yourself next year.

I have spent the last couple of days at the fantastic Semi-Permanent09 design conference here in Auckland. It was totally amazing. It was an incredible way to cap off what has been an exhausting couple of weeks for me, so much so that I couldn’t even muster the energy for the after party last night. What a lame-o.

There was so much awesomeness that I am still trying to digest it all and put it in the appropriate compartments of my brain, but some of the stand out highlights for me were:

• Kiwi lad Cleve Cameron who kicked off the whole 2 day inspiravaganza (that’s an inspiration extravaganza). Cleve took us though his past work sliting the glug with expert use of spungo deliveries and transmissions in Wellington central (my explanation of what this actually is wont do it justice, but it was a great story of a remarkable idea that completely engaged people). He then took us through some wonderful creative work he has done at agencies around NZ and Australia, including the fantastic ‘don’t feed the ducks‘ campaign for Australian brand Wonder Performance bread. His latest project is another triumph of imagination and story telling; a band from the future called the Beop. Rather than explain it check out their latest transmission (from the future of course) at Beop beam central. Cleve obviously has both an incredible imagination, and a remarkable gift for storytelling, and he was a great choice to get things going.
• Sanky from AllofUs told us about a couple of their really interesting projects, like building a giant Einstein head that allowed people to experience what might be going on in his brain by literally getting inside it. AllofUs has a great multi-disciplinary team, and they are doing some amazing work on projects that people would kill for. I love this diverse team based approach to problem solving, and the companies that are doing it are doing some of the coolest work around.
• James Jean is an incredible artist/designer/illustrator. There isn’t really much more to say. His body of work was jaw-droppingly beautiful, and made me glad I had dragged myself out of bed to make the morning sessions on the second day.
• Kate Moross is super cool. Her work is totally rad, and she obviously has an intuitive understanding of how to build a brand. Roll in a penchant for the remarkable (my observation, not her words) and it is no wonder that she has become so incredibly successful. Two things she said stood out particularly for me (excuse the clumsy paraphrasing): that it isn’t hard to learn how to do things, so just figure it out if you need to, and that nice isn’t a word you should use, but a thing you should be.
• Harry Pearce of Pentagram had the unenviable task of delivering the closing presentation. Normally this is hard enough, but when the conference is already running more than an hour late, and the audience are dying to get to the after party it is even worse. However Harry rose to the task, delivering what I thought was one of the most interesting insights into the creative process of any of the speakers. His was a touching, personal story, and his passion for both design and people came through loud and clear. Of course it helped that the work he showed as part of the story was equally incredible.

There was also amazing stuff from Philip Hunt from Studio AKA (am definitely going to catch their two short films – Varmints and Lost & Found), Tim Beard from Biblioteque, David Carson, Arvind Palep and Aaron Duffy from 1stAveMachine, and Alexia Sinclair. In fact, there really wasn’t any filler.

I am not a designer, at least not in the creating beautiful pictures/garments/paintings/buildings kind of way. I do like to think that through my work in building brands I can be as brave, creative, and just plain awesome as the speakers that we had the pleasure of seeing at SP.

Huge props to all the organisers, and to all the speakers. Thank you!

I got tired of complaining about how silly the Easter trading laws are, so put my slightly hung over Easter Monday to (good?) use giving version3.0 a bit of a makeover (as well as finally upgrading to the newest version of Wordpress – which is pretty sweet).

The guts of it is the awesome Minimahl, with a few tweaks here and there. Definitely a bit more work to do, but maybe I should write something first…

Yeah, that’s pink y’all.