SCABs

Scamping up a SCAB – By @JaneyLbarker

Scamping up a SCAB 

This week at SCA we dabbled in some scamping with Dusty as our mentor. I’ve never used scamping as a creative expression before but I’ve got to admit it, I thought it was brilliant.

Before writing this SCAB I consulted Google like I always do. The fact that Google asked me If I meant ‘camp’ or even ‘vamp’ suggests that Google either; needs to fix up on its SEO or that there just isn’t enough info out there about it! Either way, the fact that we had two sessions with a scamping specialist feels like one of those special SCA privileges. So, I’d like to share some golden nuggets to anyone out there, perhaps a potential SCA applicant.  

Scamping is a way of visually communicating the creative ideas that are floating around in your head. The best part of scamping is that you don’t need to be an artist or an illustrator. You just need a sheet of paper (or maybe 50), an idea and a nice flow between your pen and the page. It’s a lot of rough sketches and I can only compare it to a free writing exercise. You just let all of the crap come out onto the page without stopping yourself or judging your ideas too quickly, it’s a free-flowing exercise and I would recommend it to anyone!

All you’ll need:

– Around 20/30 pieces of paper. It’s quantity over quality at this stage.

– A nice pen, preferably a recyclable one to make up for all the paper (sorry trees).

– Your marvellous creative brain.

– A few triggers such as brand straplines (which help to get you into the creative flow) e.g. Berocca ‘Release the youth inside’.

– This one seems trivial but helped me out a lot. Play music! Dusty played a range of songs some slow, some fast, some super electronic and trust me it all affects your scamping flow. I found that the super-chilled music with a constant beat silenced the critical voice in my head which would typically say “stop drawing, you can’t draw, omg look how terrible that drawing is, you can’t show people this drawing” and so on.  

Now grab your paper, pen, music and word triggers to start sketching away. Let whatever the words trigger come out visually onto the page and keep going until your hand hurts.  

Something which was refreshing to hear was the reminder that nowadays most fellow creatives are on autopilot aka as soon as they come up with an idea they want to grab their laptops and start mock things up, which is obviously fine, but while you’re mocking up the idea on Adobe or After Effects you’re already making conscious choices about the executional decisions like choosing a font, colour scheme, placement and the art direction treatment in general. 

This stops whoever you’re presenting the idea to (whether that be a client of your creative partner) from looking exclusively at the idea. And we are reminded continually that this, above all else, is so crucial and central to what we are doing. Ideas, ideas, ideas, come first. 

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