If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE5Ip60_HJk

This is part of a mental health initiative that was shown in schools and went online late September. It’s now due for a limited release in the cinema.

Mental health, eh?

I can’t claim to know a great deal about the subject, but I did once have a bit of a weird turn around 1998. I arrived at work as normal then felt a massive urge to hide under my desk and start crying. Not sure where that came from, and by the end of the day I felt much better, but when I mentioned it to other younger creatives at my agency a couple of them revealed that the same thing had happened to them. I wondered if it had anything to do with the large indirect financial pressures that are sometimes placed on very young shoulders. No one comes out and says that this million pound production budget has a hell of a lot riding on it, but under the surface that’s all quite clear and everyone knows it.

I think HR departments are a little more comprehensive these days, but I don’t think there’s much in place to catch people on the way down.

If you want to read more, this post is quite interesting.

If you’re going through anything, try NABS, or visit your GP.

… this.

I love PES.

His stop-frame animations are so witty and charming, as well as being truly original:

The good news is that he’s made the shortlist for next year’s Oscar nominations for this lovely little short.

Enjoy.

PS: if you want to hire him, he’s repped by A+/Academy.

Following the odd ad featuring Kiefer Sutherland, Acer have now employed Megan Fox to greater effect:

I recall disliking the Kiefer one because it didn’t seem to have anything to do with his real personality, just a character he played on a show that was cancelled years ago.

This one, however, plays well on the unemployed Hollywood bimbo image of Megan Fox.

So the lesson is: If your ad makes some kind of sense, and has a good script, then it might not be shit.

It’s an interesting new take on the age old problem of advertising rubber johnnies, and as a product demo it’s pretty darn fine.

Good music and nice direction means it’s definitely the best ad I’ve seen since last week.

I follow a Twitter account called Advice To Writers. You’ll be stunned to discover it provides snippets and links of advice to writers.

One such snippet slips into my conscious thought almost every day: the writer’s only responsibility is to make the reader turn the page.

I find that interesting because something else I’ve thought of many times is the refrain, ‘The Da Vinci Code was such a piece of shit, but I couldn’t stop turning the page’. Many people read that enormous bestseller and felt somewhat ashamed of themselves for finding it addictive. Dan Brown fulfilled his sole responsibility with incredible skill but what he got in return was a whole load of dissatisfied customers who thought he had another responsibility to write with elegance, verve and originality.

I see both sides: you can’t get millions to rattle through your novel without being very good at writing, but managing simultaneously to disappoint so many readers is a bit of a shame (see also: 50 Shades of Grey etc, which I have yet to read). I suppose the Catch 22 is that you can’t have millions of people think you’re shit at writing unless you’re very good at it.

This comes up often in advertising through the advice of Bill Bernbach: ‘If no one notices your advertising everything else is academic’, capitalism’s equivalent of ‘If a tree falls in the wood‘. It’s impossible to argue with that, yet the people responsible for so much of today’s advertising obviously don’t really believe it, or aren’t prepared to do what it takes to create ads that really stand out.

The statistics of how many commercial messages bombard us each day versus the number we notice are stunning, and yet clients, CDs, account handlers and yes: even creatives, are prepared to add to the gallons of beige paint that cover our planet disguised as adverts.

I wonder if there’s a correlation between those who read and deride Dan Brown and those who happily create advertising that is unseen and not heard.

A few weeks ago I was browsing Facebook when I came upon a status update from my brother. It read: ‘If Britney Spears can get through 2007, you can get through today’.

I thought it was vaguely amusing and it fit within Twitter’s 140 character limit, so I tweeted it.

It was then retweeted 4538 times and favourited 1716 times.

To put that in perspective, if I write a Tweet and it gets retweeted more than ten times I get embarrassingly pleased with myself, and pat myself on the back for managing to distill some part of the essence of human existence into 20-30 words.

4538 times is obviously way beyond that. It is an indication of something that his hit the spot for a lot of people (4-5000 retweets suggests a lot more people who read and liked it but didn’t bother to RT ). But here’s the thing: I didn’t write it (obviously), and I had no idea that many people would give a shit. It’s still being retweeted weeks later.

So what I’m trying to say is that I have no idea what people on Twitter really like (other than the kind of cod-philosophical stuff you can put on a tea towel), but I am happy to be a conduit for my brother’s genius.

Raquel Welch space dance (thanks, W):

Random Bond generator (thanks, T).

YOLO (thanks, J):

The Smiths lyrics as Penguin Classics (thanks, T).

Brilliant fake tube signs (thanks, T).

Haunted Toaster (thanks, J):

Cockney Romney (thanks, A):

The power of creativity (thanks, T).

The best thing ever is 40 seconds into this (but watch it from the start. Thanks, AA):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS1uDnIPTvo&feature=fvwrel

And as I was watching that, I saw a link to this (7,238,455 views):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrBj3u5dPgM

Last week Seth Godin wrote the following blog post:

Avoiding the false proxy trap

I think that’s an amazing bit of thinking. He’s taken something we all do, day after day after day, and turned it on its head. Using a set of scales isn’t always an innocent way of finding out whether or not you’ve gained a pound; it’s often a malevolent method of displacing your self-perspective.

The real kicker is that it’s the things we really want to measure that we just can’t: happiness, attractiveness, beauty, worth, impact, meaning.

I remember reading a quote from the Rachel Papers: that’s the trouble with having a vocabulary more refined than your emotions. Defining the abstract is often like trying to catch a sunbeam (or a raincloud) in a jar. It’s intrinsically without firm definition and subject to unpredictable change. You might be happy about work but unhappy about your relationship. Does that make you happy or unhappy overall? What if you feel really attractive until you speak to your controlling and insecure boyfriend?

But we generally feel a a need to be in control of things (that’s the reason behind many cases of anorexia: the amount of food you put into your body is something that’s down to you, unlike how that bully makes you feel, or why your mum’s ill), so these proxies are just an attempt to do the impossible, and in the end they end up doing more harm than good. If you measure how attractive you are by the amount you spend on clothes then you’re going to marginalise other things that might be more important to that attractiveness, and you’re going to place far too much importance on the label in the back of your jumper.

I see Seth hasn’t offered an way of making sure we focus on the goal instead of the proxy, but the first step to finding a cure is being aware that you have a problem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEpQ8O1BAgU

I suppose that’s because it makes mum look like a brilliant hero of Christmas, the person who brings it all together, choosing trees, wrapping presents, cooking dinner etc.

While dad is portrayed as some idle twunt who doesn’t lift a finger to make the big day happen.

Sexist indeed.