Firstly I would like to apologise for the lack of posts on our blog over the past 3 months or so. It can only be a good thing that we are really busy with other things, which I shall delve into now.

So we both finished uni and received our grades a couple of weeks ago, and both got high 2:1 degrees…lets not get too much into that though as its a sore subject. We are both ‘happy’ with it but it would of been nice to get a 1st class honors, obviously! Anyway-Pete of Polliewannacreate.com (one of our friends, check them out) has done enough posting about this so il leave it at that.

Next-We recently took part in D&AD new blood, it was great fun and helped us out a lot, we had a crit with Mother london, of which we were asked to take our book over after our crit to leave it with them. We are now just waiting for our return with 2 new pieces but we have not been able to yet (il get onto that in a bit). So that was really good for us and gave us some confidence that, hey, we must actually be ok at this advertising thing!

And then-we took part in the Shelf awards at the Getty images gallery. A really great event to take part in, we were asked by Gary sharpen to take part and we made the shortlist of 5 which we were really happy about. Stefan could not make the event due to a move to London. So I ‘took one for the team’ and did it on my own, I had plenty of support from both uni colleagues and a couple of people we have met on crits and portfolio events. The event was a great opportunity to get contacts in the industry and try and secure crits, placements & sometimes even jobs! I received plenty of business cards and people asking us to go in for crits and a chat with them..at the end of the evening the votes were counted (the guests marked your book out of 5) and the winners were announced-We were really pleased to get 2nd place, and we lost out to another team from Lincoln..so it was fine :)!

As mentioned previously Stefan was moving to London, I had already made the move myself, we both live 1 street away from each other which is really helpful for working on our book, and catching the ‘hellish’ tube to work at rush hour (there AND back). We are both settled now and really enjoying being here.

Finally-we started our placement at Dye Holloway Murray the weekend after Stefan had moved in which was the 5th of july, a lovely agency, really small but produce some great work, I think having Dave Dye as a CD/partner may have something to do with that! We had 2 weeks placement sorted and half way through the second week we were asked if we would like to stay on for another week..we obviously said yes, you cant turn down a placement..nevermind working so closely with Dave Dye. We have been working on some lovely briefs and we have had one brief signed off which was fantastic news, we will keep you posted on this (I promise). We were meant to be finishing today, but we have been asked to stay another week which is again, great news.

Thats all for now, better get back to some work.

N

http://facesinplaces.blogspot.com/

We attended Portfolio night 8 on thursday at Ogilvy in London, a fantastic evening put on by them and the people that run the event, we took the same book twice and both saw 3 creative directors each, with 15 minutes with each it was like a speed dating creative night, a lot of fun! Faced with the likes of Brian fraser of Mccann Erickson it was a nervous 45 minutes for us both, but we came out of it rather positively and with some very good comments on our book.

Thats all for now kids.

Up There from Mekanism on Vimeo.

Secondly – After doing some research into Skype for a brief we have set ourselves, currently advertising, virals and so on. We found this, pretty old Viral and im sure most will of seen it, but it couldnt go without a post as it had us both in stitches!

Firstly D&AD and YCN was all finished off, sent it off and we awaited the results, but more on that soon. Secondly we began to gather our things from our ‘working environment’ recently in preparation for our final year show…

It felt rather strange, and really hit home that our time at uni is almost up! But…onwards and upwards (hopefully), and we are both really excited for our move to London. Things with the final year show are coming along nicely, the boards are up and may I add it looks HUGGGEE! the boards and painted and we will start hanging our show on thursday and EVERYTHING to be handed in and head to the pub on tuesday.

Finally, we recently made a trip to London for another round of crits, after a shocking 5 hour bus journey, which we cant complain about really as it cost us £2 each. we had a very successful first day, no cancellations and our book seemed to be going down rather well with people, also nice to catch up with the people we had seen before. We managed to get a placement offered to us, which was fantastic news but did not quite get a date secured. We then headed over to an evening hosted by the YCC in central London where creatives were looking at student books, got some really good feedback, some contacts and hopefully something will come of those soon. Our second day was really good, more very useful feedback and we know where to improve. After myself and Stefan returned we decided we would chase the placement offer up, made the phone call and things seemed to be taking a turn for us…we secured a start date for the placement, a very very happy day for the both of us, after setting out as a team in 2nd year, we made it our goal to try and secure a placement before we left uni. We were not particularly expecting this to happen, but its good to set yourself goals. This time its worked out for us so we are over the moon!!!

I know this is quite a brief insight into whats been happening in our lives over the past couple of months, but we promise to keep this blog more regular from now.We are heading back to London again in just over a week to attend Portfolio night 8 at Ogilvy so we will be sure to update you with anything that happenes on that evening.

Ciao for now,

Neil

Another reason we have been mentally busy is down to shooting a promotional film for ourselves, this has taken alot of prep work, finding the perfect locations, a dolly cam in the shape of a car with a fellow student hanging out of the back to film for us (Thank you Pieter Konickx). We are currently about 80% through this process and rather happy with it. Setting up a room to look like an “advertising crack den” was rather fun, aswell as chasing a car down a main road in Lincoln was fun.

Here is a sneak preview of our ‘Ad crack den”

Ok, so sorry for keeping you that might read this, probably not a great deal of you. We have been mentally busy recently, trips to London, a new book..which means new products and new stratergies, on top of that we had D&AD and YCN student competitions to hand in. We have been working on D&AD for the past 6 weeks, Metro newspaper and Lastminute.com, both of which we took to London before hand in to get feedback, which was very very useful as we knew what we needed to do to get it the best it could possibly be. Happy to say both went down very well in some of Londons top agencies, Metro more so, so we have our fingers crossed for both of these!!

We have also been working on YCN for a while now too (cant remember exactly when we started it), but we wanted to get that out of the way so we finialised it all, foam board, and mounted the lot and got it handed in before D&AD, then focused on finishing touches for D&AD last week. We chose to do P&O ferries & Bollocks to poverty for the YCN briefs. We have our fingers crossed for these too, but for now its book work..book work & erm….more book work, oh and plenty visiting lectures, oooh and i almost forgot, a promotional film for ourselves. This should be very very interesting, we have what we think is a very strong idea, its all down to how we shoot it now and edit it..keep you all posted on that though.

We set off to London last monday after slogging our guts out for 2/3 weeks on creating a new book. Great start to the week, train delayed! once the train arrived we were told we would have to get off at Spalding? and change to get to Peterborough, then to London. Good job we were not just down for the day. Anyway, we arrived…eventually. Headed over to AMV BBDO to drop our book off for Paul Brazier for him to take a look over, before our meeting on the wednesday (more on that later). We had a crit arranged at McCann but unfortunately McCann had been evacuated for a fire alarm, and when we called, the guy we had a crit with was not at his desk.

Tuesday- We tried to walk into agencies for crits, and to cut a long story short we had no luck, everbody was ‘out on shoots’ apparently. So we thought we would call up to try and re-arrange our crit we had the previous day at McCann…SUCCESS! Great crit, great feedback, a junior team who really helped us, where to improve etc and told us they were looking forward to us returning. We headed over to Leagas Delaney, ‘One of those crits’..no constructive critisism, just critisism..! We then went to Saatchi X, a little bit of a ‘wild card’ for us, not particularly the type of advertising we have studied, but still a great agency (infact they just won agency of the year at MCCA awards). Very useful crit, nice people we saw…more to come on that, keeping a few things to ourselves, understandably.

Wednesday-We went to the National History Museum before our crit with Paul Brazier at AMV to chill out and forget all about it, its free, and a very interesting place so i would advise it if your in London and you have time. We headed to AMV and had a little wait before we were called to his office. Eventually we were told to make our way up, greeted by his PA, very nice lady, and she asked us if we had visited galleries, to which our National history museum visit came in handy. Paul was in a meeting, and arrived after 5 minutes. Very very nice guy, great history to his life and how he got into the business himself, it was more a general talk and tips on how to get the best book possible, and how to realistically get into the business. A very useful crit, arguebly the most insightful crit to date, we went away feeling rather pleased.

Thursday- Red Brick Road, again a very useful crit, how to improve, what to keep in and what to take out. By this time we knew what was coming with most of our crits, but we soldiered on. JWT, brilliant brilliant crit, very nice guys we saw there, lovely place aswell, again our book was not quite ready for a placement, but we know exactly what we need to do for our next visit. Earlier that day we saw a creative in the bank in Oxford circus who we saw on our very first round of crits from WCRS, and we managed to arrange a crit for late that day, so we headed over to WCRS to see him, again, we knew what was coming but still a useful crit.

Friday- Our last arranged crit, and probably the best one of the week, a place we really really felt a great connection with, very nice creative director we saw, told us what we needed to do, and he was more than happy for us to return!

Our final crit was arranged by uni (thanks Mike and Gyles) and it was at Wieden + Kennedy, we had seen Sophie and Ben last year, who were running the crit with 20 students from our year. Another crit which just reinforced what we had learned all week.

A couple of beers to top of the week we had just been through, a dash back to Kings cross, a train home to Lincoln for me, and a train to Hull for Stefan (for a wedding). A rather relaxing weekend.

Great week, but tiring. Now back to the drawing board

Neil

Preparation

Stevie diggin in!

The verdict…Picture says it all.

Personally…i think Stefan loved it, but he just did not want to admit it. I think the combination of crips in a sandwich makes so much more sense than biscuits…surely? Sweet and savoury mixed is always going to end in disaster?

Anyway…here is another Dutch reaction to MY variation of sandwich, atleast someone doesnt mind admitting my combination is the best ;-). Cheers Pieter!

Stefan was satisfied with the crisps on their own…He’s like a child at christmas!