A creative career never fails to surprise and delight with fresh experiences that turn preconceptions on their head. Creativity Director Dale Haste reflects on a recent not-your-average-day in the office.
Take film shoots. I, like many creative buddies, have spent many hours kicking heels on location, patiently waiting for set-ups to be composed, dressed, made up, lit, rehearsed, repeated, tweaked and repeated again.
Nothing wrong with that, of course. For years, the UK ad industry has been the envy of the world, not just for creative excellence within agencies but also for the craft and professionalism of the film crews who apply painstaking, feature film fanaticism to 30-second mini-epics. (But man, it does drag on sometimes!)
Skip forward to this winter and the ever-accelerating digital democratisation of our industry knocked me for six all over again. I hooked up with Jamie Huckle from WaveFX to shoot a promotional film for our brilliant client Meet Cambridge, the city’s leading event venue specialist.
Jamie and his talented team have all the craft and professionalism described above. It was just that now they were armed with a state-of-the-art 360° VR camera (pictured here with our presenter Georgina Burnett). The day-long shoot redefined the notion of immediacy, urgency and creative energy as the camera demanded centre-stage and dictated its own exhilarating schedule.
I could whack on at length about the immersive effect of the finished product, the astonishing aerial drone footage that had me sweeping over King’s Parade like a kestrel, and the cockpit control afforded to viewers to explore their own three-dimensional experience.
But what really struck me was the speed and simplicity of the shoot. The camera captures everything, so the composition of the shot is anything and everything that is in view. This generates a hyper-reality that is extremely seductive and energising creatively. Theatrical staging goes out of the window to be replaced by WYSIWYG adrenaline.
Of course, all of this is part of a bigger picture of how we define ourselves as creative agencies. Our traditional playing fields of communication are being ploughed over. Areas that were once the preserve of agencies and their production partners have been liberated for all by technology – so we need to find new ways of creative expression to justify the value we add to client marketing departments.
At Mobas that means a focus on bold, transformational strategy and creative conversations that enliven brand voice at every level and every direct touchpoint, including via artificial intelligence. For creative people it’s not better, it’s not worse: it’s just different. And different is what great creativity is all about.
