Missing links

I've been very busy the last week. I worked the whole weekend through and from sunday till monday I slept at the school again. I'm quite exhausted, but it's worth it. Next week I've got my face-to-face classes, which mean that all the ideas I've made will be evaluated.

By the way, when I first made my blog I forgot to put in the links of some of the my most important contacts from Holland in the links. I'm glad Hjarald Agnes from Orgasms 2 mentioned to me that his site isn't on there, because I can immediately set everything straight. Hjarald used to be the owner of creative hotshop Orgasms, until it became BSUR. Last year he started Orgasms 2. It's a multidisciplinary, pan-European platform and community. Creatives from all over the world can subscribe on this site and put their portfolio on. You can even send in ideas and if they're good enough, they can use their network and knowledge to actually produce it. Good way to get all those fantastic ideas in your portfolio produced. I'm the contactperson in Hamburg for this agency. Look at www.orgasms2.com.

Energize is an online actionmarketing agency. For eight hours a week, I write copy for them. Their work is no nonsense and very effective. No arty farty stuff, they just make websites and viral games that work like hell. And they've got the statistics to prove it. Look at www.energize.nl (it's in Dutch, but for the people who can read it: I actually worked on the copy as well).

Havasu Films is a film production company from Amsterdam. I used to work with them for a few Fanta commercials and I've kept in touch with them since then. Before I left to Hamburg, I used to DJ a lot at their parties on friday night. These guys are very inspirational and work with top creatives (I regularely saw Paul Meijer leaving the building when I spun my records). www.havasufilms.com is their website.

And last but not least, I'd like to put the agency of my former art director in the spotlights: Hallelujah. I've been through a lot with creative director Peter van der Helm when he was my teampartner. His bad manners and directness towards people often got him into a lot of trouble with creative directors all over Holland, but I rarely meet people with more heart and enthousiasm for advertising than Peter (exept maybe at the Miami Ad School ;-). His creative hotshop deserves to grow very big. At www.agencia-hallelujah.com you can see his work.

Okay, now that I've got this straight, I'll go back to work. I still have a lot of campaigns to execute. I hope to be able to show some dazzling work pretty soon.

It´s still a late club

There haven´t been a post of me the whole week. You´ve probably guessed it´s very busy. Right now it´s ten o´clock. I just had concept class and tomorrow we have to perfectionize a lot of campaigns for the ad layout class. That means we´ll all be in school for a while.

So I´m sitting in class with some fellow late working students. They all had too little sleep this week, but everyone has to go on. I already made some work, but tonight I also have some writing to do for Energize, the online company from Holland I work for.

I guess you can still call this the ´late club´. Only this time it's not with people who are too late, but with people who stay too late. Oh well, tomorrow it´s weekend again and I can enjoy a well deserved rest. At least until saturday night ;-)

Welcome to the late club

I hate being late. And I especially hate being late for school, because I know how much it is appreciated at the Miami Ad School that you're on time. The first time I was too late was during the class of copywriting. I thought the lesson started at 9:30, but when I entered the door I came in in the middle of a presentation. It seemed that class started at nine. I didn't get any punishment, but the shame I felt was far worse than any punishment.

Talking about punishment, the penalty for being late is fifty campaigns. And that's not fifty ads I'm talking about, it's fifty campaigns consisting of at least three ads each(!).

Last week I was late for a guest speech. I smoked a sigarette outside and I didn't have a clue that a guestspeech already started for 2 minutes. After the lesson I got an e-mail from the director Niklas, starting with 'welcome to the late club' and the procedures for making the fifty campaigns.

Some students can't sleep when they get punishment like that. I see it as an opportunity. An opportunity to train yourself in fast concept development ánd and to make something good for your portfolio. It's hard though, cause my father came to Hamburg this weekend so I didn't have enough time to work for school. Right now the counter is on nineteen campaigns. What am I doing wasting time writing a post for my weblog? I should be doing the other thirtyone campaigns! ;-)

VW Passat advertisement

Txt: The new, very economical Passat is out

I´ve been at the Miami Ad School for about one and a half month now and I´ve made an incredible amount of ads and posters. On this blog you see only a tiny bit of it. That´s because 1. It would take me a dayjob to put all my work on the blog 2. I keep all the best work I make for myself for a while, especially when it concerns conceptual work.

For the ad above I gladly make an exception. The reason: as soon as I was photoshopping the ad somebody informed me that the ad is already made. Actually, a similar concept even got nominated in Cannes. Of course it's a pity, but I decided to finish the ad anyway.

The concept behind it is that the new Passat uses so little fuel, that gas stations have to do something else to make a living. In the example above a gas station has been transformed into a discotheque called 'pump it up'. In another ad a gas station became a drive-in cinema, with a big screen hanging from the ceiling.

Too bad somebody came up with this idea before I did. It's a bummer, but I keep on hoping that sooner or later I'm going to make a Cannes ad that hasn't already been made ;-)

Classic methods against junkies

When I pass the ´Hauptbahnhof´ or ´main station´ in Hamburg, I always hear classical music. I thought the cheerful violin and piano melodies were there for the amusement of passing travellers. It is not.

This week I heard that classical music is the latest weapon against: junkies! Can you imagine? Classical music to chase away junkies? I'd say play some Dutch hardcore gabber music, or the twisted terror/breakbeat sounds of Venetian Snares (but then again, that would probably chase everyone away).

Now the most surprising part is that it actually works! It seems to drive a drug addicts mind crazy to hear the same music over and over again. So far for the no-tolerance policy that they've got in Amsterdam. To kick junkies out, you don't need a military police, you need an orchestra. Well, this proofs once again that sometimes the best solutions for a problem are the craziest ones.

On destiny...and funny stuff

My new table

Last week I met a cute Spanish girl. At the end of the evening she wanted my telephone number. So far so good. This week my Dutch subscription is finished, so I made a German prepaid from my phone. The number, by the way, is +49 (0)1601624818. I tried to reach the girl with different phones, but her mobile seems to be disconnected. Now here's a really bad coincidence: I have a different number and there's something wrong with her phone. How bloody ironic! We'll probably never see each other anymore, because in a big city like Hamburg it's unlikely. It probably had to be this way. Like some twisted game of destiny.

I believe in destiny. Not in a new age kind of way, but as a rational way to cope with bad coincidences like the one this week. I think life's a lot easier if you just accept that negative events like this happen. It also allows you to turn negative occurances into something positive. The bad experiences I had in Dutch advertising the last few years, for example, all seem to have had a purpose: it drove me bit by bit towards the Miami Ad School.

That's destiny on a pretty large scale, but I also have this philosophy about small things. When I came from school this evening, I passed a furniture shop, where I saw the beartable in the picture above. I immediately liked it. The yellow bear is funny, but the glass plate on top is serious, which creates an ironic contrast. I needed a table for my computer and it costed only 35 euro. But because I have to be more economical than a Dutchman on welfare, I decided not to buy it. Instead, I decided that whenever something happens that directs me towards this table, I'd immediately buy it. As soon as I left the mall, I saw the subway I had to take was driving away, which gave me time to go back and buy the table. So the conclusion is that destiny is the reason I'm typing this post on a beartable.

If I ever meet the Spanish girl again, there must be some reason for it (whatever that is ;-).

Charles Bukowski Poster

Charles Bukowski poster

Now I´ve published about three soccer posters on the site (and there are still seven to go), I thought it would be time for a change. So, before everybody thinks I´m only making soccer posters at school, I´ll show a poster from a different course: typography.

The assignment was to make a poster using only one typeface that's in the style of Charles Bukowski. He's a sarcastic, dark writer who was addicted to alcohol all of his life. That's why I put the mandatory extract from his book in the shape of a bottle. Furthermore, I rotated a piece of badly scanned in writing paper to give the suggestion of prison bars. Because he was like a prisoner of his own addiction.

I am particulary proud of this poster because: 1. I like the writer Charles Bukowski 2. Despite the restrictions I managed to put an idea in the poster. For the lesson of typography I have to make nine posters on A3 format, black and white, every week. It's a hell of a job. But whenever you make so many posters, there are always one or two posters that you're completely satisfied with. Yesterday I finished the new nine posters within four and a half hours. They certainly learn you how to work fast here.

When hard work doesn´t pay off

Very often hard work pays off. The bigger the dissapointment when you work very hard and in the end the outcome is not what you expected. It happend to me Thursday. I worked so long on a concept for the German newspaper Bild that I forgot the time. It was 1:00 in the night and me and my teammates couldn't go back by public traffic anymore.

So I spent the night at school for the first time. There was no good concept and no expectation of a good night sleep. Well, that's the risk of being in a job where it is expected that you're constantly creative (which is impossible). I'll just have to get used to the dissapointments. And other things didn't go too well either. This was one of those weeks where everything went wrong. Well, you can´t have it all. At least not all the time.

On top of that, it was also the busiest week so far. This weekend I had a workshop on Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday evening I went to a drum ´n bass party in Rota Flora, some sort of squatters house. So today I´m totally exhausted. I figured it might be a good thing to take it a little more easy this coming week.

Soccer poster 3

Text: Need more exercise than this one? Play soccer at Moorweide. Sunday 4pm.

This poster was completely blank except for one small line that you can only read when you bend down. If you read the text you´re confronted with the fact that you´re already do exercise.

This poster was also placed in the honorary book. That's three times in a row that our poster was chosen as the best. One of our teachers said this was the best soccer poster he's seen in the last 1,5 year. We must be doing something right ;-)