The Brilliant creative team blog

Here is a fantastic animation short by Royale called ’Impossible Present’.

Not only is it brilliantly done, the comedy elements and timing are played out with perfect precision. It gave me flashbacks to the Christmas just past, watching my one year old fruitlessly attacking his presents wrapping :)

Check out more of Royale’s work.

Buoyed by the 2011 success of its Star Wars-themed ‘The Force’ advert (Adweek’s ‘Commercial of the Year 2011’, 44 million YouTube views, 6.8 billion impressions), Volkswagen is again going intergalactic for its 2012 Super Bowl XLVI TV commercial. Called the ‘Bark Side’, this 64-second teaser previews the full advert which will air on 5 February. Featuring a collective of canines (some ‘dressed’ as characters from the series’ titles) barking the ‘Imperial March’ from the film’s soundtrack, it’s looking like it will cause as much of a sensation as last year’s Vader-themed clip.

Graffiti guru Above has been one of my top five favorite graffiti artists for the last decade not just because we share a common love of using chunky-ass arrows but the shear vibrancy of his work that has kept me looking out for him. Apart from his signature arrows stencil, the art is full of color and manically controlled backgrounds which almost pay homage to the 80’s, plus he paints lots of hot chicks.

He, just like King Robo and Banksy prefers to keep his identity a mystery but he has a
website, a book and even a wikipedia page.

So you have been given a print job to work on. You have your layout setup and looking great, you have flowed in all the copy and created all the styles and masters you will ever need, at this point you couldn’t be more efficient... now all that is to be done is source some awesome looking photography.

Images of great photography start to flash through your mind, you know what you want and now you’re on a mission. A quick check from client notes "a young, attractive woman at a party having fun", easy!

You enter your search and wait in anticipation like a kid opening a birthday present who is 99% sure what it’s going to be, only to be greeted with page after page of the most bizarre and useless photography ever taken. What results next is hours of searching and next page clicking as your excitement dwindles into despair and you actually wish you could punch the models in their stupid faces.

Wow... what happened there, everything went dark?

Anyway, there is a fantastic website called www.awkwardstockphotos.com dedicated to the best of the worst in stock photography, seriously this is simply amazing and should be a real eye opener to those that don’t have to deal with sourcing stock photography!

Buzzfeed have also put together their top 60.

Happy new year everyone... so back to work and back on the hunt for more awesome stuffs to inspire, excite and generally distract you from what you are supposed to be doing.

I have found some really talented work by Laura Bifano who takes the focal subject of her paintings and throws a modern twist at it, turning the subject into blocks with almost an over sized, disorienting pixel like effect.

They have a hallucinatory quality to them which I really enjoy plus, it reminds of that Simpsons episode... you know the one where homer eats the mega hot chilly and trips balls.

View more of Lauras fantastic collection here.

We haven’t had to many Christmas tunes playing in the studio this year, I think we are all a little sick of them to be honest, but it’s not really Christmas without a them is it. If you’re kind of feeling the same, why not check out these alternative Christmas mixes to get you in the spirit for the big day!

Benji Boko’s - A very Christmassy remix mixtape

Marc Hype - The worlds second greatest Christmas tape

Enjoy :)

This is another awesome piece of animation created in After Effects by the people at Future Deluxe.

I have seen plenty of similar films recently, but its the small details in the animation that really excites me, especially how they achieved the illusion of heat waves emanating from the sun, it just looks so slick!

... Right I’m off to hunt down the tutorial.

This is a fantastic little animation by Erica Gorochow which explains the, erm... fundamentals of brand design. Not in it’s entirety of course but a very good basic level of the process in clean and clear manner.

Although the accents in the narration seem a little odd to me or at least very strong, the style, timing and execution are outstanding.

Imagine a world without sounds that spark emotion, that allow a wondering thought or strengthens the imagination... It’s a sad place Isn’t it!

Soundtracks, background noise and effects are more powerful than any visual but can be so subtle we often give the credit of our feelings to what we can see rather than hear.

Take any horror film for example, without the power of the audio I doubt we would feel, tension and suspense, you know somethings about to happen but more often than not It’s down to the clever eerie sounds that build to cause a reaction.

Radium Audio are a London based sound design agency who have a beautiful portfolio. They record, enhance and create sound that stirs emotion even to the point of the perfect resonance of a Bentley indicator!

Check out more of their work. Radium Audio

I have a thing about zombies films and the whole ’Walking Dead’ genre in general, probably because it’s the only form of horror that works on me, why... because it could happen (Nah not really).

With my love for Left 4 Dead, The Walking Dead and Dawn of the Dead I set to work on an instructional survival guide... until I found this on Vimeo. Produced by Nathaniel Lindsay, the film helps you decide on your post apocalypse wardrobe though to excellent uses for surplus human skulls.

I now feel confident that I could survive the post apocalypse of a zombie outbreak.