Cover paper!
Cover paper!
Cover paper!
This was the gospel of my tutor Tony.
For the only way you where going to get anywhere, was to go on a paper binge!
I was already living by this before I started the Watford course,
covering paper with my regular entries on One Minute Briefs,
placing them on my TONY I WANT IN! blog.
Eventually getting me into Watford,
and winning the most prolific OMBLE award,
hitting two birds with one stone.
Quantity and lots of it in thinking!
I loved producing loads of ideas,
because it never felt right getting to something with a few scrapes of paper.
It didn't feel there was a enough hard work behind the idea.
Keep covering until you got to one good idea,
keep covering until you got to two good ideas!
John Cheese once said in a talk on creativity,
that during his Monty Python years, he never settled on the first good sketch,
he strived until he got a second, a third, a forth better then the first.
This was the reason the dead parrot sketch came into existence, persistence!
I remember my week at GREY London, during the Watford tour,
and a creative team called Greg and Thomas said to us all,
that our biggest enemy was ourselves, that we must beat the best thing in our book!
That would mean always working on our book, always coming up with more and more,
until one idea toppled the best one!
One single creative that inspired me,
during my time at Mother London,
was Paddy Fraser, former Watford.
As Paddy put it in a interview with DRUM, you need to keep practicing and practicing,
until 1 in 40 is good, 1 in 20 is good, 1 in 10 is good!
Anders Ericsson said's in his paper 'The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance', it takes 10,000 hours of practice to be a expert at something.
So as I sit in Starbucks with my pad of 500 sheets of wilko paper,
(forget about the fancy layout pads, paper is paper, plus it's cheaper),
I cover, cover, cover, until one day, every sheet of paper has one good thought on it.
That or I cover 500 sheets of paper in a day with crap, and a few gold nuggets.
You must shovel through shit before you find gold.
Thursday 27 April 2017
Saturday 22 April 2017
MAKE LOVE WITH YOUR PARTNER.
I was sitting in the pub one day having a pint of Guinness with one of my close friends.
Rambling on about the creative partners I had tried and failed to form a team with.
If there was something I never got right during my time at Watford, was making a team!
I had five creative partners, made up of close friends, people I felt I was compatible with, and people my tutor Tony felt I was compatible with.
What I mean by compatible is what Tony would describe as someone who was logical, partnered with someone who was.. well, the opposite.
Two very different people working to each other's strengths to make the complete team.
The left and the right side of the brain.
This always reminded me of the sci-fi film 'Pacific Rim', where two drivers where synced together, to operate a giant robot known as 'Jaegers', to fight giant monsters called the 'Kaiju'.
The only way the Jaeger would work and win the fight against the Kaiju, would be if the drivers were compatible together, worked together.
But compatibility didn't mean two different people, it could be two brothers or father and son, a personal bond, just someone you felt right with.
Someone you could let into your mind, your life, to fight together as one!
The foundation of McDonald's and the idea of fast food itself was formed by two brothers 'Dick' and 'Mac', who lead a strict system.
And even though there where hiccups in the early stages, they stuck together through thick and thin, and built a successful formula.
Their bond as family made a effective team and kept the quality control of McDonald's high.
Ray Kroc noticed this and delivered that way of management with couples across the franchise of McDonald's in America, to keep standards in check while he wasn't their to mange himself.
McDonald's was family.
Cus D'Amato wasn't just Mike Tyson's mentor, he was his father figure, the man who looked after him in his own house, eating at the same table as his family.
This destructive team wasn't just achieved by hard work, but respect, love for one another.
Mike Tyson went on to be the baddest man on the planet, but he could of been the greatest heavyweight of all time if Cus hadn't kicked the bucket so early in his career.
Even one of the greatest bands of all time, if not the greatest, started because Keith and Mick bumped into each other at Dartford station, with a common love for rock n roll and blues.
Compatibility is more then talent, hard work or being different for that matter, it is being best friends with that person, letting them into your life.
By the end of my rambling, I concluded to my friend over the table, that a team who is simply compatible, would be like a man and meeting a woman; "Your female. I'm male. Lets make a baby".
Now a team that get along together is like this; "I like you. You like me! Let's make love!".
Imagine how grey creativity would be if teams just worked together because they just fit like parts, there would be no fun, no fire in the studio space, just a factory wheel.
Great love leads to great ideas.
Rambling on about the creative partners I had tried and failed to form a team with.
If there was something I never got right during my time at Watford, was making a team!
I had five creative partners, made up of close friends, people I felt I was compatible with, and people my tutor Tony felt I was compatible with.
What I mean by compatible is what Tony would describe as someone who was logical, partnered with someone who was.. well, the opposite.
Two very different people working to each other's strengths to make the complete team.
The left and the right side of the brain.
This always reminded me of the sci-fi film 'Pacific Rim', where two drivers where synced together, to operate a giant robot known as 'Jaegers', to fight giant monsters called the 'Kaiju'.
The only way the Jaeger would work and win the fight against the Kaiju, would be if the drivers were compatible together, worked together.
But compatibility didn't mean two different people, it could be two brothers or father and son, a personal bond, just someone you felt right with.
Someone you could let into your mind, your life, to fight together as one!
The foundation of McDonald's and the idea of fast food itself was formed by two brothers 'Dick' and 'Mac', who lead a strict system.
And even though there where hiccups in the early stages, they stuck together through thick and thin, and built a successful formula.
Their bond as family made a effective team and kept the quality control of McDonald's high.
Ray Kroc noticed this and delivered that way of management with couples across the franchise of McDonald's in America, to keep standards in check while he wasn't their to mange himself.
McDonald's was family.
Cus D'Amato wasn't just Mike Tyson's mentor, he was his father figure, the man who looked after him in his own house, eating at the same table as his family.
This destructive team wasn't just achieved by hard work, but respect, love for one another.
Mike Tyson went on to be the baddest man on the planet, but he could of been the greatest heavyweight of all time if Cus hadn't kicked the bucket so early in his career.
Even one of the greatest bands of all time, if not the greatest, started because Keith and Mick bumped into each other at Dartford station, with a common love for rock n roll and blues.
Compatibility is more then talent, hard work or being different for that matter, it is being best friends with that person, letting them into your life.
By the end of my rambling, I concluded to my friend over the table, that a team who is simply compatible, would be like a man and meeting a woman; "Your female. I'm male. Lets make a baby".
Now a team that get along together is like this; "I like you. You like me! Let's make love!".
Imagine how grey creativity would be if teams just worked together because they just fit like parts, there would be no fun, no fire in the studio space, just a factory wheel.
Great love leads to great ideas.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)