Windows without walls?
Apple (the Macintosh-maker, not the fruit) have been rather successful with their «Get a mac» campaign. The whole campaign is based on poking at Microsoft and while it is done in a humorous manner the Seattle giant have been less than thrilled.
A collection of «Get a Mac»-ads from youtube
This week they launched a new commercial as part of their $300 million campaign to improve Windows Vista’s tarnished image.
Microsoft’s new «I’m a PC»-ad
As a whole I think Microsoft (or their advertising company) have done a great job. The quick presentation of different people from all walks of life, all being «PCs», seems well suited to strike an emotional chord with the audience. Heck, they’ve even sprinkled it with a handful celebrities! As a piece designed to win mind-share and reassure their users it should work brilliantly. I don’t think it’ll improve Windows market-share though, but then again they have something like 90% alread. I think even Steve Ballmer acknowledge the possibility that a tenth of the human population might actually prefer something else.
I think the commercial fails when it comes to convincing dissatisfied Windows-users to stay with the program. If you’re frustrated with your computer «everyone else does it» is a meek point. Particularly when Apple is targeting this demographic directly (and looking at the numbers, quite successfully). Microsoft is hardly oblivious to Apple’s attack though, and handles it with aplomb and miss the target completely - all within a minute!
Microsoft’s new slogan is a stroke of genius: «Windows - Life Without Walls». It lends itself to spoofs (try replacing that ‘w’ with a ‘b’ or how exactly does windows work without walls? etc). But this could be a good thing if MS is looking to build mind-share. Every spoof, no matter how brutal, will help people remember the product. It is also brilliant in more ways than one:
- It’s a pun, which makes it easy to remember
- It gives a positive message about the endless possibilities a PC can offer
- It could be read as a subtle attack at Macs as these force you to buy from one company
But as I’ve already mentioned, they’ve also made a grave mistake. The very first part of the commercial directly refers to Apple’s campaign. They have simply taken Apple’s «PC»-character and tried to change his message. My immediate reaction was that this was kind of cute, but after having some time to think about it I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a disastrous decision and this is why: They remind people of Apple’s campaign.
Why on earth would you want to remind people about
your competitor? 
Especially as this competitor is targeting the
dissatisfied people among your users? It also gives
Apple ample opportunity to bite back. How long will
it take before we’ll see John
Hodgman* selling fish or sporting a beard?
It’s not like MS offers much Apple can’t match and
by doing this they make sure almost every blogger
or journalist writing about their campaign will
also mention Apple...
*The actor portraying PC in Apple’s ads
The making of a presentation (part 5)
Challenging words
One of the challenges of making a slide-presentation that has to work on its own, is to find the right balance between text and imagery.
The complete slide-deck in all its «glory»
As I've mentioned on several occasions, I believe slide-presentations should be predominantly visual and compliment the information given orally. When making this presentation however, speech was not an option. Needless to say, text would have to do some of the job. This was probably the hardest part for me. If I were to give the presentation live I would have lots to say. I would talk about how inspiration might elude you when you desperately need it. How that great idea might appear just as you were about to fall asleep. I would also augment the key-slides with additional information e.g. Read: Novels, newspapers, magazines, blogs, cereal packages - anything.
Now,
I could just have delivered all this information
in text-form, but it would dull down the
presentation. I figured the best way to solve it
was to make the viewers fill in most of the
blanks themselves. I'd only use a few
key-sentences highlighting the message of how it
is impossible to force creativity. I repeated
the key sentence 'you cannot force creativity'
to make sure it registered with the viewer. I am
still not 100% sure I pulled off the balance
between simplicity and information but hopefully
I wasn't too far off.
Finishing touches
And that was it. I read through the whole thing a couple of times, made some small changes to the font-sizes etc. but as there was no way to make advanced transitions and the timing was up to the viewer, there was little else I could do. As presentations go I think it works out reasonably well. It does not overload the viewer with information and [hopefully] the key-message should be easily grasped. I am also quite pleased with the fact that I manage to keep it as short as I did. As this is the final part of this informal 'making of' I would just like to say that I hope you found some part of it interesting. If nothing else it should serve as a glimpse into one person’s creative process.
The making of a presentation (part 4)
Graphical refinements
As I had already went through several version of the presentation in my mind things were starting to click. A short doodling session gave birth to a whimsical looking character I decided to use instead of the generic 'loose appendixes' one.
Some of the different stages on the way to a finished slide
Quick drafts of the different slides came about within minutes and could begin to consider the finer points. One of these finer points was to refine the earlier idea of somehow separating the two main-segments. I decided to make the 'feed'-slides with a strong line and strong colours as they referred to the more active side of my inspiration-recipe. In contrast, the 'rest'-slides should have a calmer, softer more organic look. Water colours seemed to fit the bill and even the fonts were either painted or traced by hand to make them more humane in appearance.
Know
your audience is another mantra that it is wise
to adhere to. Unfortunately I had no way of
finding the key-demographics among
slideshare-users. I did however know a little
about the judges of the competition. I even
recalled reading Guy Kawasaki praising the 'art
of sucking up'. I decided to give it a shot. As
all the judges are also authors, I decided to
include imagery of these in the 'Read'-slide.
The judges should recognize their own work, but
it should not distract from the presentation as
a whole. Certainly too good an opportunity to be
missed. As I finished my illustrations I scanned
them into my Mac and combined them with the text
in Photoshop where I also performed some
additional touch-up. The hard (but fun) part was
over...
The making of a presentation (part 3)
Going graphic
While the text-problem needed fixing I was also working on the graphic elements. My initial idea was to use a character where the head and hands floated freely in the air.
Original doodles in the background, first serious draft in the front
The head would be as generic as possible to avoid provoking anyone. (Similar to what I used in my Electing #44 video). Unfortunately, just like with my initial text-experiments I found the design didn't work particularly well. It just seemed too bland and didn't deliver anything the viewer would be bothered to spend time on. Needless to say it wound up in the giant archive beneath my desk.
These
early problems got me to rethink the whole
presentation. While I was stilled convinced the
basic idea was sound it clearly needed some
fine-tuning to reach its full potential. My
first step was to cut down on the number of
slides, particularly for the "feed"-segment. I
decided to use the five strongest words and
leave it at that. I'm a huge follower of the
short-is-sweet-school (although reading this
blog you might find that hard to believe).
Keeping it short would also increase my chances
of getting people to read through the whole
deck. To further streamline my presentation for
the purpose of the competition, I decided to
combine the large words and artwork in the same
slide. (If this was to be a live presentation I
probably wouldn't have done this). Next step:
Designing the slides.
The making of a presentation (part 2)
Finding a form
OK, so now I had a plan for my presentation. Not only that, but I already had a fairly clear idea about the look of the piece. As this would be designed exclusively for the Slideshare-contest it had to work without sound an the text would have to be legible even in a small embedded flash-player. The idea was to use huge type in a one-word-per-slide layout emphasizing the do's and do's. I planned to display each word followed by a similar slide where an illustration was composited on top of the former slide.
As
the two big-word parts of the presentation were
to deal with different tasks I figured I'd
better find some clever means to separate them
visually as well. For the "feed your brain"-part
I decided to go for an 'active' colour like
green, while I reserved a nice pale blue for the
more passive "rest your brain"-segment. I
immediately fired up Photoshop and after
experimenting I decided on the font
Hattenschweiler.
To
make the text a little less boring I gave them a
slight gradient. I still wasn't 100% satisfied
with the look, but finished the first iteration
of these slides to see how it played. Oh, what a
snooze-fest. While there was nothing wrong per
se with the slides I found it impossible to
concentrate while watching through them. If I
couldn't entertain myself, how could I expect to
keep the anyone else's attention!? Back to the
drawing board then...
The making of a presentation (part 1)
Finding creativity
For those of you who have yet to see the ‘Cultivating Creativity’ presentation, just scroll down to my last post. As a huge part of my blog-posts have been about Slideware Presentations I figured I had to participate. And if I was to participate, I wanted to do it right, meaning: adhering to my own ideas and philosophies about what makes a great presentation. As an oral presentation wouldn’t be possible I would have to use more text than I would normally do, but it had to be strong visually. First thing’s first though and the first challenge was to decide upon a topic for the presentation.
The very first physical piece of the presentation-puzzle
Some of the topics I considered were myself, Norway (my country), Visual Storytelling (surprise) and anything else that popped into my mind. In the end though I decided to go for a shallow but entertaining meta-presentation. (A presentation about itself.)
So
with this in mind I began doodling and
brainstorming on paper. While doing so however I
felt that the topic was perhaps too shallow.
While I felt fairly comfortable that I could
make a presentation interesting to watch, it
might be a hard sell to actually get anyone to
watch it in the first place. Yet, I didn’t have
any better idea, so I pushed on. When it
suddenly hit me: My search for creativity was
the answer. How often hadn’t I found myself in
search for the creative spark? How often hadn’t
I experienced the creative part of my brain
firing on all cylinders when laying in bed
waiting for Mr. Sandman to arrive? And even
better: I knew how to treat my brain to spark
the creative process in the first
place!
World's Best Presentation Contest
-Cultivating Creativity
No reason to elaborate I guess. I have entered the following presentation in Slideshare’s World’s Best Presentation Contest. Looking at the competition it’s unlikely it’ll win any prices, but I had some fun creating this and succeeded fairly well in what I set forth to do.
I’m planning to run a series of posts about the creative process behind the presentation. Anyone interested in learning how I attack the creative process should look in over the next few weeks. Cheers!
Edit: as the version on slideshare is lagging quite heavily I’ve included my own Flash-file here.
Edit2: After a less than perfect experience it now seems everything is in order over at the Slideshare-site, so I’ve put that version back up...
Christmas Animation
Regular readers may have noticed that my bloging-frequency has taken a severe dip the last couple of weeks. One of the reasons for this is that I've started work on a Christmas Animation. (It's that time of year again*).
’’Nordpolen’’ is Norwegian for 'The North Pole'
The style I've chosen for this project is a simulated cut-out/handicraft look. This is more discernable when the images are in motion but hopefully these couple of images can help you get an idea of what I'm trying to achieve...
*It obviously isn't quite that time of year yet, but these things take time!
Ramblings #3 - Electing #44
Yup it's finally time for another one of my Pointless Ramblings. This one might actually not be entirely pointless.
This time I've tackled the media's role in the upcoming election and I think it should be worth a look for just about anyone. Enjoy!
A higher quality Quicktime-file is available here.
Ramblings #2 - Why good coffee is good and great coffee is crap
Coffe Time
As my former Superanomalies-clip was an outstanding success. (At least in the scope of this blog). I figured it was about time for another one.
Monkey business?
This one is all about coffee and is not
recommended for the squeamish coffee-drinker.
(Don't tell me you weren't warned). A higher
quality Quicktime-file is available
here. Any positive sensible feedback
is welcome.
LSD - take 2
Since my last post about the LSD project I haven't really made that much progression. Being more than a tad under the weather, finishing the first of my ramblings-films, bloging and my work at my dayjob has taken most of my time. When I in addition to all this played my first football- (soccer-) game for more than a decade it has obviously not been much time left for animation.
Some rough pencil sketches to guide me through the upcoming sequences
I have done a little work though. I've finished sketching out the opening tune for the titles and opening sequence and I'm fairly pleased with the jolly little accordion-waltz I've composed. In my own humble opinion it has the right "french" sound to it, which fits perfectly as the film starts in Paris. I have also done some rought pencil sketches for the next couple of sequences and got some new ideas for the title-sequence that seems to push their way to the front of my attention.Finally in case you were concerned, LSD (my film) does not have anything to do with drugs what-so-ever. It's actually an acronym and I promise to reveal the title the next time I mention the project.
Cheers!
Ramblings #1 - Superanomalies
Phew, it's hard work sorting out those a's and
o's in anamolies anamalies
anomalies!
I've been working for some time on the first installment of what I've chosen to call "Pointless Ramblings". No, that is not the new title of my blog. The idea behind this, and hopefully future ramblings, is to make a quick video about uh... something. I prepare a text relatively quickly and get a soundtrack in place based on the text. I then more or less improvise by making illustrations, animate text and put together a visual to accompany the video. In lack of a better term it could be called video-jazz.
Yes it does say superanomalies...
I don't nitpick on every detail, everything does not have to be great. OK is good enough. This is the only way I'll be able to get stuff like this out while still having some time left for more ambitious projects. Now, hopefully this should still mean that the "ramblings" are both watchable and mildly entertaining. I think #1 is, but I'm obviously biased. It has been said that _a picture is worth a thousand words_, so if my calculations are correct this film should be worth nearly 5 millions of them. Happy viewing!
A higher quality quicktime version is available here
LSD - part I
As we approach the end of the first month of 2008 I figured it's about time setting some personal goals for the new year. One of MY goals for the year MMVIII is to complete to short-movies, the first one an animation called "L.S.D.".
Now, I'm not a trained animator. I have however always been extremely fond of animation and the magic behind it and I've dabbled a little in these black arts since childhood with my father's super-8 camera. I also have several books on the subject and am not a stranger to running animations frame by frame just to get a clearer picture of the techniques used.
My current project really came about as I was expermenting with my new computer. I was curious to see how well it could cope with HD-video so I made a few rough sketches, a couple of frames of animation and made a composite. It all worked out very nicely and these humble beginings soon developed into a full-fledged idea for a chaotic, but hopefully entertaining, short-animation. I am also using the project as a learning tool to see where I can find short-cuts that doesn't ruin the experience as a whole. I must constantly remind myself not to spend too much time perfecting every piece and rather go for a raw but charming quality that I'm fairly pleased with so far.
If I were to describe the style/theme of the animation I think Tex Avery-meets-Terry Gilliam-meets-Scandinavian children animation is about right. Perhaps in the future this could simply be known as the T. Benjamin Larsen - style…
I'll return with more posts on the projects later, where I'll discuss techniques, tools etc. For now I'll leave you with the first public image from the film. See you later!
Genesis of the MacBook Air
As I wrote in my last post I have a hard time seeing the potential market for this product, but perhaps this is just the way Apple planned it? The ultra-thin enclosure and solid-state drive is new stuff for Apple and maybe, just maybe, they're not 100% confident that everything will run smoothly with this first generation product.
So, to avoid risking extreme expenditeur and an outright scandal, it would make sense to roll out a product that only sold in relatively modest numbers. This would give them a lot of valuable feedback about how this stuff works in the real world.
Perhaps it all started something like this:
Backing the winning horse...
Following the US primary elections on the news is at the moment surprisingly entertaining. Polls seem to be based on coin-tosses and any predictions might as well be created by a random-prediction-generator(tm). Still, this doesn't stop the "experts" from weighing in with their opinion about the prospects of the different candidates. Upon closer inspection there seems to be a fairly clear-cut pattern to their analyses and it looks something like this:
