So I saw on adage.com the latest spot for AT&T’s More Of Your Thing campaign which is a charming spaghetti western commercial that turns into an animated musical. I initially thought to myself, I like this. Maybe I’ll post it on my unnoticed blog. Then, with a search, I found it was done by Dougal Wilson. A director who I have admired his work for years. Particularly that Love Lost video from ages ago. I’ll post it below. I searched a few times on YouTube and couldn’t find the AT&T spot that I wanted to embed, so I went to Vimeo. And with that, I stumbled into a D&AD clip of a talk that Dougal Wilson was giving about his creative process. This video is far better than the original thing I was going to post which was just a commercial.
The following video dives more into the on going dialogue I am having here (possibly with just myself) about creative process and making. Have a look.
There are a lot of powerful things that happened in that video for me. The first of which is keeping the brief open enough for someone to lend their creative thinking to the idea. Far to often, I have seen clients get very literal and very prescriptive about what they want done. I think this behavior might, sometimes, come from a place of trying to constructively help. Or, most definitely, trying to control an outcome. This unfortunate short sightedness amputates a creative disciplined persons ability to collaborate their thinking to an idea. Thus the old adage two heads are better than one remains true.
Dougal also goes through the thinking process by doing which answers questions, creates new ones and finds technical techniques that work. Allowing himself to be open to experimentation knowing that it’s not supposed to be perfect the first time out develops the idea. Thank you D&AD for sharing.
Oh. and here is that old Love Lost video. Still good.
And here is that original AT&T Ad I started with.
https://adage.com/creativity/work/att-train/2173281
