This film was made for Rex McWhirter, a brilliant creative and good friend of MB who recently moved on to explore the freelance world.
We always try and send people off with a little movie just to thank them for all their hard work and Rex was no exception. As someone who’d made a real impact on the studio (and who will continue to do so in the big bad world outside) we came up with an idea that told the very simple story of Rex’s inevitable cosmic trajectory.
We shot it all on a 5D over one evening a couple of weeks ago. Shoreditch inevitably becomes a bit of a ghost town at 4am on a Tuesday morning and it was fun trying to capture that. Guy then created Rex’s ’spaceship’ and extra ambient lighting in after effects – culminating in Rex’s ‘reveal’ at the end.
We wish Rex all the best in his new quest for adventure!
Everyone in MB London is thrilled to welcome founder and CEO Ben back to the studio this week. Ben has popped over from San Francisco, where he has been establishing our US presence, to check in and see how we’re all getting along here in Blighty. Yesterday we got together over a few beers as he brought us up to date on the latest MB developments and shared some of his inspiration and thinking.
In the photo, Ben’s showing us a film of his little boy playing on an iPad – a ‘digital instinctive’ in our midst.
One of our new San Francisco studio clients has launched a genius new app — Flipboard. The app, which shapes up all your ragged social media feeds into one beautiful magazine experience, is being hyped big time. Ashton Kutcher tweeted “If you have an iPad the flipboard app is a must” to his 5 million followers, and Wired gave the new app a shout out and early hands-on review. It is currently the tenth most talked about topic on Twitter, and has had over 100,000 hits on youtube since yesterday.
This movie will give you an idea of how it works – you can see the moving identity we produced at the end of the clip.
I came across the photographer Tim MacPherson last week and his photographs perfectly capture the memory of my childhood adventures. Have a look at his website for a nostalgic thrill.
Today is my last day at Moving Brands. After a week of seeing the ins and outs of a creative agency whose ideas begin at the stage where others would execute theirs, I have definitely got a better idea of what area of work I would now like to get into.Not only is digital, moving and integrated advertising/branding the future, it is also fun and exciting with the possibility to explore ideas that have no boundaries. Seeing the work that evolves from Moving Brands has helped me to recognise how my creativity can now grow. This is an exciting prospect, which without the constraints of university can only help me boost my portfolio, developing campaigns relevant today and in the future.
I would like to thank everyone here for treating me as one of the team and making my stay really comfortable. A week has flown over in such a fun and hard working agency but I may be back with the odd blog entry or ice cream based job bribe any time soon.
Yours truly, Camilla Grey, will be speaking at one of the first events completely dedicated to the business of Augmented Reality: The Augmented Reality Event Presented by Qualcomm, taking place June 2-3, 2010 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA. Moving Brands are in the “AR in marketing and advertising” slot and will be showcasing Living Identity as well as looking at AR from a “moving world” perspective. Other speakers I’ll be persuading to sign my iPad include the weird and wonderful godfather of AR, Bruce Sterling and TED talk extraordinaire Blaise Aguera y Arcas.
If you are in the San Francisco area and fancy popping along, you can receive the reduced $195 registration price – $200 off the $395 normal price – by using Discount Code: E195 during registration. This fee includes both conference days, lunch, reception and more.
Follow Moving Brands live from the conference on Twitter via the #are2010 hashtag/
Last week Moving Brands were featured in a Design Week article on animated logos. According to DW, “Clients increasingly have to consider the impact of their brand properties across a range of media platforms, so it makes economic sense to invest in animation at the early stages of any identity project” – a belief Moving Brands was founded upon! For those of you who can’t access DW Online, here’s our 5 inches of fame from the piece.
“A multi-platform, moving world is the starting point for all of Moving Brands’ projects. ’If you design a brand and haven’t thought about how it works on-screen, you haven’t done your job,’ says Moving Brands founder James Bull. ’I tell students that the letterhead, the logo and the business card should be the last things they think about. Companies use Power Point and e-mail, and send movies to each other – that’s where brands need to work.’
Moving Brands designs creative explorations and executions that include animation, sound and interactive elements for all their clients, whether they’re telecoms companies such as Swisscom or more traditional clients, such as Savile Row tailor Norton & Sons. ’Once you’ve got those elements, you can repurpose them for print,’ explains Bull. ’If you do it that way round it’s easy – and clients don’t then have to spend £30 000 on the last three seconds of an ad, because the branding consultancy has already worked that out.’ Not all branding consultancies have this unfailing and all-encompassing approach to animating brands.”
Click here to watch our latest case study showreel.
In conjunction with the piece in today’s Design Week, we are pleased to officially announce the launch of our new studio in San Francisco. Moving Brands’ CEO and founder, Ben Wolstenholme (pictured), moved with his family to live full-time in the city in early 2010. The new Moving Brands studio, located in San Francisco’s eclectic SOMA neighborhood, will enable us to service the fast moving needs of our West Coast clients as well as the wider U.S. market. The San Francisco studio is our fourth global division, with studios already in London, Tokyo and Zurich.
Keep checking back to the MB blog for further updates of the launch as it rolls out state-side.
“Mercury Brands” a new insight piece from Viewpoint magazine, highlights the core of MB’s philosophy – that brands must learn to lose control and love change. The piece, in issue 25, the latest edition of the magazine, cites our open pitch for A Brand for London, as an example of agencies “taking an increasingly collaborative approach with the public”. As an agency we feel excited for the brand possibilities emerging from a more open, collaborative culture. The strongest, and most successful brands, are the ones that adapt and respond to the environment around them – be that anything from time of day and user activity to consumer input and re-interpretation.
Aki Shelton, our Creative Director at Moving Brands Japan in Tokyo, sent over these photos of a crazy marketing bus found in Harajuku. Apparently there are 9 TV screens on each side of the bus, blasting music as it goes. I wonder how Londoners would feel about one of those travelling down Oxford Street!
Aki also wanted to let us know that Tokyo is also playing host to the CMWC – The Cycle Messenger World Championships. Since 1993, the event has been hosted in cities around the world, bringing a combination cool bikes and fashion to avid spectators.
Responding to unprecedented economic, environmental, and cultural change, we used social networking applications and found media to make this film. This movie mash-up explores the nature of our fast moving world and how it is vital for brands to change, adapt or die in order to survive.
Advertising has changed. It is no longer about inspiring people to simply buy a product. It is about inspiring people to emotionally engage with the brand. Now that digital advertising has begun to embrace social networking, it means that emotionally invested consumers can share and express their involvement, becoming more attached in the process.
The beauty of all the DIY Barclaycard waterslides and Cadbury’s eyebrows doing the rounds on YouTube is in people being moved by an idea to the point where they chose to propagate it, and in unforeseen ways.
A brand that can develop a life of its own is truly a moving, living brand. Today’s companies must learn that a brand, which performs brilliantly within their own parameters and environment, is good. But a brand, which performs brilliantly in the outside world and in other people’s hands, can be something really great.
