Ian Anderson Workshop

I was invited along to Ian’s workshop by my fellow student Alex has a ‘creative guest’ which I felt was a lot of expectations on me from the very beginning, was I to be called on to be creative on demand? Anyway we were separated into groups almost as soon as we arrived with the aim to challenge us by making us work with people we hadn’t worked with before and people who’s working style is different to that of our own.

We were then set a quite elaborate but ultimately pointless task. We were told that ‘In the future the world is run by one organization, it can be evil or good it’s up to us. Circumstances conspired that in this future every colour is owned by a different company. Somebody at world organization has decided they need to rebrand across the world with new signs and uniforms etc. The company who’s colour is chosen will be of course quids in as their colour will be used on everything across the world and each company is desperate to win the contract. In our teams we must present a compelling argument as to why our colour is to be the chosen colour.’ We were given the colour green which we felt could be seen as very easy, but also very difficult due to the associations that already go along with that colour. So we brainstormed ideas first and tried to narrow down our colour to its key identifiers and it’s most powerful attributes. We decided that green stood for regeneration, growth, balance and peace amongst other things. Another big thing associated with the colour green is recycling and although it was obvious we didn’t want to ignore it just because of that. It was decided that rather than looking at recycling in the conventional way that its seen here in Britain, throwing your tins in a separate box from your other rubbish, we would look more at the principal of recycling and the reusing of things such as ideas. An idea for the presentation was deciding on where we would try and claim that we were trying to recycle all the defining features of all the other colours that would be pitching and make them ‘go green’. A small stop frame animation to illustrate this idea was then created, it was mainly to give the audience something to look at after viewing a couple of dry presentations. The animation was simply the other colours being fed into a shredder but out of the other side came only green, a subtle way of putting the boot into the other teams we thought. I was fairly happy with the animation and a friend from another group commented that you could certainly tell that I had made the animation as it had my style running throughout. For the rest of the presentation we decided that we wanted something punchy and uncomplicated so we took the key words that we felt best described green and put them next to pictures in a simple slide show that would reinforce these values. I thought the presentation went ok and Ian and Hitch seemed to generally think that we had done well but maybe hadn’t pushed certain angles of what we presented well enough. If we were going to stick the boot into the other teams we should have gone straight for the jugular rather than a little dig followed by a little bit of humour. We possibly had to many things going on and didn’t push home the message that the world organization really had no other choice than to pick green as their colour.

After initially worrying slightly what was in store for me in the workshop I’m pleased to say that I genuinely enjoy the experience and learnt a few things along the way. One of the main things I’m going to take from the lecture is that I now know I have the ability to get up at and start working for 9am in the morning and being a student isn’t an excuse to sleep in. If I want to do well on this degree I really need to put the hours in so I’m going to try and make this my routine. I thought Ian was a really nice guy and it was interesting to see the way in which his mind works, I wouldn’t mind keeping in contact with him in the future for opinions on future projects.