Bruce Lee - an inspiration to us all.

Okay so Bruce Lee is actually a total freak - but we love freaks so thats all good. Just watch the clip and be inspired to greatness.

The creative devil wears Prada

Last Friday was a rather sad day for us. Our favorite senior freelancing creative Adey Richards finished his stint at Blackwood. The creative department has been a bit light, with only one intermediate team plus us as interns. Luckily Adey was freelancing almost the whole time we have been here. The Pond's senior copywriter, Phil Parsonage also worked for a couple of weeks, but these two were the only senior creatives we have been able to learn a few pearls of wisdom from (and not nearly enough!)

Adey walks in the office with his Prada shades every morning,
so we did this poster and stuck it up on the wall behind him. He loves it! (Adey is faking 'angry'!)

Both Adey and Phil were awesome guys. Phil loves making wicked comments about everything while Adey would sing to any and every tune on the radio. I still remember one afternoon Adey, Anna and I launched into an impromptu singing trio, singing along to an old cheesy BSB's classic! Although the two seniors were often stretched by the crazy amount of work they needed to handle, they were always nice enough to give us help even when they were totally exhausted near the end of the day. In particular Adey, who sat right next to us, gave me some very useful art direction advice. To have the chance to learn from a senior art director who has worked with the legendary Paul Arden and David Trott was just unbelivable.

Well Adey, we'll miss your singing and the Pad Thai lunches we had. Most of all we'll miss you as our mentor and my morning Man Utd scores update with you. Hope to see you again in our next agency!

TVC!

Recently we have been working on a brief for Alfa One Rice Bran Oil which ended up in a TVC and series of print ads! It was a real bonus being able to go on our first TVC shoot and we learnt a lot about the process - and how painstakingly long even the simplest things can take! While we think that the idea is perhaps better in print... it was cool to make a TVC too. After coming up with the initial idea, our creative director took the lead on most of the decisions about the details voice over and music - so some things we would have done differently, but all and all we are stoked to have had the opportunity to get a good idea of what a TVC involves.

AdMedia 'Make An Ad' Competition

We've just received the latest issue of AdMedia and found out that we won ourselves a 2 year subscription with one of our entries in the 'Make An Ad' Competition. Yeah~! So thrilled!

We had a fun time making the entries, and to win a subscription to our favorite magazine is really awesome. The mag keeps us up to date with the latest ads & local industry trends and the weekly Fastline is great for job hunters like us. Thanks for choosing our work, AdMedia's judges & Dave Gapes!

DIY DNA

You've probably seen these new ads for Mitre 10 made by DraftFCB but they are fantastic so we thought we'd put them on the blog! Such a cool insight, and just so darn cute.

[Updated] Just found out from AdMedia that Michael's AXIS classmate Iain MacMillan & Antony Wilson are part of the creative team who did this Mitre 10 campaign. Well done Iain & Ant~! :)

Out of tune radio

Our first brief at Blackwood was for the NZBus iPod promotion. Luckily we came up with the goods on our second day and got to make a radio ad! It was really interesting going to the recording, choosing the talent and stressing about getting the rights to the song (which changed about 5 times!). Our idea was also expanded into an ambient stunt with singers giving out flyers on buses. Enjoy :D

Click below to listen to the radio ad.

Our first team placement - Blackwood!

Hi everyone, we'd like to share some job hunting news. For the last 4 weeks we've been doing our first placement at Blackwood Communication Group (BCG)!

We've been thrown into the deep end from day one and are glad that we cracked a radio brief in our first week, which eventually expanded into an ambient idea as well. It was really cool when the ad was aired 3 weeks ago (we'll post it on the blog here soon).

Not wanting to be a one-trick-pony, we have pressed on to have more ideas through in the last few weeks. Contributing to a big pitch was stressful but we really enjoyed it. Overall we think we've learnt a lot and are glad about how well we work together in a real agency environment, considering we're a newly formed team. In fact, we feel like we've been here a whole lot longer than 4 weeks! 

Anyway, before we end this post and get back to work, we'd like to say a big thank you to all the CDs and lovely people we've met in the last few months who have been helping us and offering us advice & encouraging words. In particularly, a big big big cheers to Paul Catmur, Paul Nagy, Tim Hall & Scott Henderson, David Gapes, Jeremy Southern, Vaughn Davis  & David Bell and last but not least our ECD James Blackwood. Thanks guys~!