Creativity gives you life!

We had dinner with a couple we really get on with the other night. She's a designer, and a little bit mad as well.

After doing some work talk and some social talk, my head was swimming with creative possibilities.

It reminded me how good it is to play sometimes. Play music, play with ideas, draw, whatever.

But watch out, I had some pretty weird dreams two nights running. Maybe I'll blog about those some other time :)

Fox wants you

Fancy a quick entry into Hollywood? Fox is asking for your story ideas on MySpace.

Sounds like a good idea - unfortunately one I don't have time or mental space to participate in at the moment. A bit of advice: check out what they do with submissions that don't win. Do you as the creator retain copyright? This is a great opportunity, but it would help you to be very clued up about the legal ownership aspects.

Hat tip: Heather Shepherd from Skip's Hollywood Hangout.

How's your competitiveness?

"the most important competition is between you and your own imagination"

Thomas Friedman, quoted in Idealog

Air travel and branding

When I travelled to Wellington last week, I had a few observations about air travel and branding.

• Air travel is a designed experience - mostly because of safety and regulatory issues. Service people deliver mostly scripted lines, and it has somewhat of an air of liturgy about it.
  
  
• The purely functional design of airplanes and runways is iconic and, even though not designed as art (or maybe it is?) it comes across as art. To me anyway!
  

And yet there are a whole lot of things about air travel that meet the needs of the airline or the airport, but aren't customer-centred.

In an extensive ecosystem like air travel, how can one player make the difference? The article below sheds some light:

Climb Aboard The Plane Of The Future - Forbes.com

Explore the Universe online

I heard about Universe / by Jonathan Harris on Coolhunting.com.

Amazing stuff. Watch the video - he had some especially interesting stuff to say about how we convey information. "The page," he said, "is already dead." Not "soon to be dead" but already dead. Instead, he shows information in terms of networks and nodes, non-linear information where you can jump in at any point and make sense of it.

I like it; now where's the software package that helps me portray information that way? If Word and PowerPoint helped us create linear information, how do we create networks and nodes? OmniGraffle is the closest I've seen. Any other suggestions?

TBI Tuesday Q&A: Jonathan King :: The Big Idea :: an online community of New Zealand's creative industries

TBI Tuesday Q&A: Jonathan King :: The Big Idea :: an online community of New Zealand's creative industries

No comment, more of a personal bookmark so I can read it later. Also see the interview with Jonathan King in the latest Idealog. (The article's not online yet, but the podcast is)

RIP: Silverscreen

NBR: Silverscreen liquidates as ad budgets tighten

And so it starts. The slow death of the traditional advertising and filmmaking ecosystem.

Death is too black-and-white a phrase for it; it's more of an evolution.

But I deliberately call it an ecosystem vs. an industry. So much springs from the way advertising has worked over the past 50 years or so in the television age.

Ads and the agency system have long provided a breeding ground for talented screenwriters, directors and actors.

Ads have also subsidised free-to-air television, a model that is under threat, though not as badly as it may seem (studies in the UK show that most people with PVRs - personal video recorders like MySky and TiVo - watch the ads anyway).

Enter the disruptive technology of the internet, and the phenomenon of consumer-generated content and Generation C, the on-demand generation...

...and the professionals are left shaking their heads and wondering how to differentiate their product from the many "amateur" content creators around the world.

And that's just the macro-trend around the world. The micro-trend mentioned in the NBR article is shrinking ad budgets and profit margins are to blame for Silverscreen's liquidation.

Ad budgets are shrinking, but are marketing budgets? No. More is being poured into below-the-line marketing - cheaper, more accountable, more targeted methods of reaching your audience.

It's a good time to be creative.

And not just artsy creative, genuinely creative.

...as in, how is my vocation/craft going to survive and evolve to live in this reality?

In fact, it's always a good time to be creative.