The storyboards Scorsese drew for a Roman epic when he was 11.

Movement in composition through the work of Kurosawa (thanks, J):

The best rappers of every year since rap started (thanks, K).

Great comedy writing advice (thanks, M).

A man with a bionic penis is about to lose his virginity to an award-winning dominatrix (thanks, J).

Michael Powell visits Scorsese and Coppola on the set of The King of Comedy (thanks, J2):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fdQRgCHod4

#LoveGod:

Here’s a New Year’s resolution that advertising might want to make: stop deliberately annoying people.

I can take the odd shitty TV ad (actually more like 95% of them), the general dross on the radio, the invisible wallpaper that bulks up my magazines and newspapers, and the ugly messes that seem to count as posters these days. I don’t really notice much of that. I’d prefer it to be better but in my mind it’s basically neutral: a sea of beige blancmange, custom made to be ignored.

But the internet banners, the cack I have to sit through while waiting for movies to start, the perfume ads of heavy stock that I rip out of magazines because they stop me flicking through them… These are the limp sex pests of the industry: unwanted, unloved and unlikely to take no for an answer.

When people say they don’t like advertising I don’t think they mean most ads. Most ads are a colossal waste of money, but they’re not actively annoying. Of course, if every ad was a nailed-on crowd pleaser that inspired rapturous chat across the globe that would be wonderful, however I’m enough of a realist to know that would be a bit of a tall order.

No, we all know exactly what kind of advertising is hated because we all hate it, and yet many of us persist in polluting people’s lives with the very thing we abhor. Admit it: you’ve cursed the bastard corporation that has made you wait 5 or 15 seconds for your YouTube clip; you’ve muttered ‘Oh, not this one again’ as you’ve sat there in your £10 seat, waiting for the real entertainment to start; and you’ve taken a deep loathing to the words ‘sponsored post’ on your Instagram and Facebook feeds.

So why do we as an industry continue to put it out there? It’s as if many of us have decided that it’s worth being hated as long as you’re seen, and perhaps there are some benefits to that. We all know irritating campaigns that have managed to stick in our minds, possibly becoming liked over time by some weird kind of osmosis. But the vast majority of these kind of ads are simply a negative experience to be endured, and what does that really do for the brand that has paid so much to elicit these feelings, or the industry that creates more annoyance and unhappiness for the planet?

And you can’t avoid them like you can avoid Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, or Jordan’s latest bestseller. You have to actively get rid of the things if you can, or sit there while your annoyance increases if you can’t. Imagine if your favourite chair came with a shitty chair that you had to keep beside it, or if you had to eat some rancid liver along with your perfect fish and chips. It would really make you hate whoever was behind such a weird set of circumstances.

So, inevitably, we have several varieties of adblocker. They don’t help with every interruption, but they do a fine and welcome job that shouldn’t need to be done. If the ads are bad enough to need blocking then surely they shouldn’t be produced in the first place. A vast chunk of the industry seems to be like a sweaty man with halitosis who can’t understand why the ladies are heading in the other direction. Actually, it’s worse than that: he knows why they run but he still goes out on the pull every night without taking a shower or changing his pants.

It’s absolutely barking, and the least we can do is stop putting out work that causes damage we’re fully aware of. Otherwise we seem both annoying and stupid – hardly a pair of adjectives anyone should deliberately set out to apply to themselves.

Happy New Year!

What did we get stuck in our rectums last year? (Thanks, T.)

The nice guys of OK Cupid (thanks, T).

Why the South Park creators are so fucking brilliant.

Good old Peep Show.

Movies before and after CGI (thanks, E).

The best title sequences of the year.

And the best cinematic shots of the year.

Happy New Year!

Amazing resin art (thanks, M):

Join a religion for Christmas:

Night of the Hunter is a truly great movie. Lots of stuff about it here.

A good, spoiler-heavy explanation of the influences behind the original Star Wars.

Charlie Kaufman interview.

The world’s best unphotoshopped photos.

The world’s worst jobs.

NY Times Year In Pictures.

Can you cry in space?

Amazing data viz of WW2 deaths:

Merry Christmas!!!

I recently read a quote from Renoir:

‘Your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves; but nature offers you millions, all on the same tree. No two leaves are exactly the same. The artist who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself’.

It’s very interesting and very true.

When Tarantino wrote Pulp Fiction in Amsterdam he filled up the movie with references to what he was seeing for the first time:

He also had Travolta smoke roll-ups made with Drum, a Dutch tobacco.

And it doesn’t have to be as direct as that. Dan O’Bannon was writing Alien when he found himself stricken with writer’s block. He wasn’t sure how to make the aliens different to what moviegoers had already seen so many times. So he went and did some research on insects, where he found the idea of corrosive blood.

Those are a couple of pro examples, but from the time I started working in advertising the idea of ‘sponging’, that is soaking up influences to improve your own creativity, was mentioned on a regular basis. Going out to see exhibitions or movies, travelling to new countries, reading books you wouldn’t normally read… these are all ways of putting some good fuel into your imagination.

But the indirect and unpredictable connections from A to B or A to Q or A to Purple can make it seem like sponging is merely an indulgence – after all, it tends to consist of enjoyable things that people do in their ‘leisure’ time, and not things that seem like work. So sloping off for a movie in the middle of a quiet day has the general appearance of bunking off, rather than directly improving productivity. Sitting at your desk reading a book could be interpreted as not taking your job seriously, or having nothing to do, even though the key to answering your current brief might be found on the next page. And you can only chat about movies for so long before you have to stop, and get down to some proper ‘work’ instead.

I’m sure I’ve written before about the way we’re conditioned in childhood to make a virtue of things that obviously seem like school work (filling up lots of blank pieces of paper by spending hours at a desk doing things you’re not that keen on), while the things that seem like ‘play’ are only allowed as some sort of reward for the work, and must be curtailed lest they eat into your work time and make you feel guilty.

Sure, there’s a point where you have to produce the thing you’re being paid for, but why does it matter how you get to it?

Maybe we should build compulsory movie, art and reading time into our jobs instead of trying to squeeze them in outside of office hours.

Filmmaker on flimmaker flaming (thanks, J).

Shitty acronyms.

Amazing historical photos (thanks, N).

get ready for Ep7 the easy way: watch all 6 Star Wars films simultaneously (thanks, J):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB1Pq1_M-Wg

Tumblr of stupid signs from Batman series (thanks, J).

Poorly-named products (thanks, J).

Michael Man n on Heat’s 20th anniversary.

Woman eats 100 slices of bread in 6 minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFOW8q8oKrA

‘What the word crab means to me’ (Batshit crazy, NSFW and thanks, J):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Vz7b5EGeR0

Trolling Brendan Sullivan (thanks, G).

Star Wars bad lip reading (thanks, C):

And, lest we forget, Triumph the comic insult dog at the opening of Attack of the Clones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV2CJlO79PE

And this was the result:

The Fist of Fury is a gay sex toy that is an exact replica of Tyson Fury’s fist and is of course, officially unendorsed by the man himself. 

The Fist of Fury twists his public profile into combating homophobia and providing vital support for the LGBT community.

You can read more at: justgiving.com/fistoffury

But in the mean time, I’d really appreciate it if you put it on your blog and/ or tweet about it. We’re really trying to get it off the ground and in front of as many people as possible. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=40&v=_YS2dSa-Ud0

Here’s an interesting piece on why we can all come up with creative ideas, but only some of us are actually creatives.

It’s a theme that has come up time and time again during my career: great ideas can come from anywhere, so if Johnny the Janitor happens to be passing your layout on his way to repairing the fourth floor bogs, and he suggests your endline might be better if you changed it from ‘Just Do Everything’ to ‘Just Do It’, then whoopee! Problem solved! Thanks, Johnny!

I’ve actually had this kind of thing happen on campaigns I’ve CD-ed. In recent years a lady from business affairs suggested a script idea that I thought was very good, so we put it in the mix alongside the work from the actual creatives and presented it up the chain. It didn’t survive to production, but that was fine – work can serve other purposes, such as showing the scope of your thinking, making other, scarier scripts seem safer, or providing the basis of a constructive conversation with the client.

But what would have happened if that script had made it to the very end? Would the lady from BA, with zero experience of choosing a director, writing an endline or running a VO session, take the role of creative during production? I think that would have been something of a disaster. Would she have returned to her department with a big pat on the back? Definitely. But what if she’d wanted to make more of those contributions, then learn the other aspects of the job of ‘creative’? Well, as the link above suggests, eventually she’d become a creative.

This is like those refutations of homeopathy or faith healing: if they really worked, that is if they passed the same degree of scrutiny as proper medicine, then it they would cease to live under those alternative names and would simply become ‘medicine’. So the non-creative who makes the contribution of a creative, that is consistently comes up with winning ideas right through to the final delivery of the ad, then they become a creative (if that’s what they want to do). And with the best will in the world, they’ll probably end up more valuable to the agency than if they stayed in BA.

But as the above article mentions, planners have been suggesting that they make contributions to the areas that are normally the remit of the creative (choosing music, commenting on the edit etc.). I don’t see why they or anyone should feel unable to speak up about an element of an ad that excites or bothers them. It may be a matter of finding the right time and place to make those comments, and the final say really needs to lie with a Creative Director, but the idea that everyone in the room should just keep their thoughts to themselves seems a bit odd. After all, in the end the public will judge the work, and everyone in an agency is a member of the public. Of course, it can’t be an unrestricted free-for-all, or you’d never get any work done, but if you hire intelligent people and work out at which stage of the process it would be best for them to contribute, then welcome those contributions.

On a slightly related note, I wonder how many of you have experienced the phenomenon of the person in another department who wishes to become a creative. Having experienced this myself as CD, I’ve been very happy for possible creatives to join from account management or planning. As in the example above, if they can prove themselves to be as effective as a ‘real’ creative then why shouldn’t they become a ‘real’ creative? Funny though that the wish to move departments never seems to happen in the other direction…

So if you can do the job of a creative, you’re a creative. If you can run round Aintree at 30 mph, you’re probably a horse. And if you can provide warmth and shelter for hundreds of people, you might be a building. Simple, innit?