The Orca Awards 09

This week Michael and I attended the Orca award ceremony at Pasha on the Viaduct Harbour in Auckland. We managed to get ourselves an invite because of our NZ Bus radio entry in the October Orca awards last year. 

While there we met some very friendly people from The Radio Bureau including Jenny Craig (Account director) & Fleur Herscott (Communications Manager). We were made welcome right from the first moment as Jenny came over to chat with us which made us two small-potato-job-hunting-juniors feel more comfortable and warmed us up for more mingling.

We caught up with Tim and Ashwin and also Karl Fleet (who happened to be the Grande Orca winners!) Well done Tim and Ash! It's awesome that they won such a big award when they are only just starting out, and they managed to come out on top of some really big talents in the industry. 

For some more name dropping - we also caught up briefly with Jeneal Rohrback (Marsden Inch) and Kate Humphries (new head of Axis Adschool). Both were Michael's Adschool tutors, and it was great to catch up with them both, especially Kate, who Michael hadn't seen in quite a while.

The free booze and food was good too! Although not so good for my samosa/spring roll addiction...YUM!

*Click here to see the official photos.

This boggles the mind!

This is a clip taken from space of the worlds aircraft movements over a 24 hour period. It is almost hypnotic as the little bug like lights crawl over the world...makes you feel small and big at the same time.

Oh and a little update from the work front - There is so much to do and so little time! But we are working on putting together our new book which is coming along nicely. 

A look back

Here are a few examples of some of the work we did while at Blackwood.

The first thing we worked on was a pitch for Waikato University. Having just come out of uni ourselves - we were able to understand the target audience well and I think a few of our insights were quite helpful in the process. While Blackwood made it to the final two agencies in competition for the business, we didn't win the pitch in the end but it was still a massive learning curve and it was great to have the opportunity to work on such a huge campaign.

Based on the premise of "whatever you're looking for - you'll find it at Waikato", these are three kind of 'big picture' billboard executions that were also expanded into more specific concepts that worked around some of the interesting things that you will find at Waikato university.

We also designed a microsite as part of a promotion aiming to get students to enrol at Waikato.

We became a sort of christmas card production company for a while and ended up designing three cards for DHL (Tasman Cargo Airlines), Audi and British American Tobacco NZ.

Michael had a fun photo shoot with Bevan Docherty for Heart Children. Art directing a shoot was a very interesting experience!

These are the Alfa One print executions as part of the same campaign as the TVC. The soundtrack from the TVC was also used in the radio ad.

Validation

Wow! This is a fantastic short film that has been winning awards all over the place. Its about 10 minutes long but well worth it! It'll make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside!

Happy New Year!

Well we have just had a fantastic couple of weeks holiday and are back, rested and ready to continue our job search in the year 2009. Our internship at Blackwood finished at the end of last year and I would have to say that we learnt a whole lot more about the industry and ourselves! The last four months had both good and bad experiences but I feel like it has all been a part of learning the business. Hindsight is an very interesting thing because I probably wouldn't have been quite so positive a couple of weeks ago! Learning is messy, stressful and uncomfortable... I suppose that's nothing new but there's nothing like a challenge the size of the grand canyon to make you realise it! So on with the job hunt. Next up we are planning on having a quick stocktake of the work that we did at Blackwood and will hopefully inject some new work into our portfolio before getting out and about and seeing some more CD's. If you happen to be looking for a creative team that is ready for anything, or know someone who is, give us a call, email, letter, message in a bottle, pigeon, angel, toothfairy, paper plane, blimp, telepathic sign, a lightning-burnt note in the side of a nearby mountain... just make contact in other words!

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!