i quickly discovered that one of the most useful survival skills for my job is gathering and maintaining a pool of references. from videos to images and (less often for me) music, sometimes simply pulling the right reference for the right brief is enough to turn a hair-tearing creative drought into hours and hours of writing when your fingers can't fly fast enough to catch up with your ideas.
i started maintaining a reference folder on my desktop shortly after joining bda. i was both amazed that my boss could so effortlessly cherry-pick and develop ideas from his seemingly bottomless pit of reference, and frustrated that he had had least a fifteen-year headstart collecting them. i figured if i was going to be useful to him, i had better start catching up.
anyway, today i found two videos in my stash that helped me write a pitch for the army (yes the army here is very media-savvy), something i usually detest doing, in the matter of a several hours. while both videos work on the idea of a missing element, a "what if" scenario that i found interesting, i'm happy to report my finished concept turned out to look like neither of the two! and my bosses liked it!
a quiet, mood and thought-provoking ad for fotoprix.
a hilariously vivid and very panicky (!) football promo for sky sports.
so how do you create this pool? as in you just fish through stuff and keep what you like? how do you file and keep track of them?
ReplyDeleteyup i just grab videos and photos off the net if i think something is cool or interesting. i like to go to motion graphics and design blogs. nice thing about using a mac is that safari lets you save embedded videos.
ReplyDeletei just keep them in one big folder on my desktop (divided into videos and jpegs) and go through it when i get a new brief and i'm stuck.