Over the past two weeks a war has raged in the Creative Advertising studio.
And that war has been on two levels.
Firstly, between the two 1st year groups (A and B).
And secondly, between the lecturers intent on leading them to victory!
The project was a re-run of the project that Winter School students had tackled and the Creative Advertising students were very keen to prove that they could produce things which were even better that those originally produced by other students in the Faculty.
Over the course of a week, each group split into pairs and set about working on a series of fascinating, engaging and appealing designs, all of which were aimed at getting a group of eager Third Years excited enough by them to be declared the winners!
The finished designs were a sight to behold: simplicity married with problem solving; metaphors raging alongside exaggeration.
Here are just a few of the pieces of work:-
Darena Stoda and Matt Parsons produced a stop motion animation which literally grew out from the ground telling their own unique story of inspiration. This solution was awarded the Runner-Up position.
A game of inspiration chess
A forest adventure: walking through the hanging vines was a journey of exploration with little clues to the team's inspirational past cleverly hidden within.
There were many favourites amongst the judges who were very impressed with what had been accomplished in the rather short timescale. But because they are talented and smart 3rd years, they looked beyond the craft to find solutions that were both engaging, interactive and just plain clear communication!
The solution that won impressed the judges because it was easy to digest and the more you engaged with it the clearer the message became. It was beautifully simple yet also invited discovery.
Kelly Bugg and Katrina Gilbert impressed the judges with their clever thinking and understanding of human curiosity. The desire to remove each block began a journey towards a clear and memorable message.
This JENGA game rode on the back of universal values we already associate with the game to breakdown perceptual barriers with ease. The work was produced by Kelly Bugg and Katrina Gilbert. The simplicity of this idea was in the fact that it used the JENGA ideals to communicate the message. First of all the blocks were two colours, to represent each individual.
Every block then also had an image or word on it which told the story of their particular inspirations. Some were sticking out, partially revealing the image and, in the rules of Jenga, invited the judges to pull them out further so they could see the whole thing.
But the beauty of this was that the more pieces of inspiration that they took away, the tower became increasingly unstable reinforcing the idea that we are all made up of a variety of influences and experiences which lay the foundation of individuality, and without all of those things we may not be the person we are now.
The judges reached a majority decision and whilst commending the other designs were happy to announce that Kelly and Katrina were the overall winners!
Congratulations Kelly and Katrina!
