Presentation Is Everything

Hey guys,

Ben took time off from his usual blog topics to talk shit on Monday so as I read his ramble I thought to myself ‘hey Hugh, you can talk smack wit da best of them, why don’t you give it a go’ and yes, I thought to myself once more, I thought, ‘Sure’.

It wasn’t until this week that I found the true joy of owning a 32gb iPod touch. As you know we have been working on the TVNZ brief these past few weeks and it just so happened that I had stopped moaning about how crap my life is for long enough to actually produce some pretty wicked looking ads for it. Then came the challenge. After slaving away on Photoshop and Illustrator for three hours, how does one do the work justice when presenting it to the tutor?

My answer wancers, was the iPod touch. I loaded that bad boy up with the images and trotted off to Uni. On the bus I showed my creative partner the work. Merrily flicking the images across the screen one by one I felt badass. Better yet, the work looked amazing on that sexy little screen (it hid some minor pixilation issues *now fixed don’t worry*). Stoked with what I had achieved I didn’t hesitate to be one of the first in this week’s line to see the tutor.

When it came time to present, my partner and I swaggered to the front and sat down. We explained to him the premise of our campaign and he was interested, we showed him the line and he was hooked, then, I pulled out the iPod touch and he was blown away. We were lapping it up, praise here, and yes, praise there. The idea was approved and now we are all feeling better. Apart from our ability, I think credit is due where credit is due for the iPod touch and the hand that it extended to us in our time of need.

I think these days creatives are almost expected to have these little tools in our arsenal. After all it is all about presentation as I quickly learnt early on this year when several of my ideas were harshly cast aside even at concept level because they were hand drawn. Which was frustrating since we are always told not to worry about our concepts and just produce rough scamps, the trouble is, if you can’t get your point across in a rough scamp then a really good idea could be lost because of poor (initial) communication.

Going back to presenting on my iPod, Ben said it was very “eat ass” of me. Jealous?

Moving on. The final point I would like to make about owning an iPod is the range of ‘sweet apps’ available to you to kill your time. This weeks Hugh’s app of the Week goes to ‘Cat Physics’ ... not gonna explain it cause you’ll just think ‘that sounds shit’ but it’s not. Play it.

Cheers.

I’ll leave you with this.