By Ludo Thomas

Under Pressure D&AD

(sang like the Bowie song)

Before D&AD I thought right I won’t let it happen again. This time it’ll be different, I’ve learned from my PB mistakes, and with this one I’ll be ahead of that curve. 

Nope. With deadline looming, with only a matter of days to go I’m still not quite out of the woods. 

There was a lot of emphasis put on doing more than one D&AD New Blood, look at 4/5 over half term and come back with three options and maybe whittle that down to two, something like that. Which is good right, because it gives you options. 

But this is where it gets tough because I find it really difficult to jump from brief to brief. I don’t know if I’m just stubborn but when I’m working on one, I get so wound into it I almost tangle myself and so I stalk forward determined to break the web, an obdurate ad spider if you like.

So instead of two briefs moving simultaneously forward, they’d move in chunks, one would surge ahead while the other would linger until I forced redirection.

We were told to 6 hat this week as part of our reflection which I though was great because it would give me more flexibility moving between briefs, but still I found myself getting caught up in a sort of bipolar tug-of-war with the red and black hat, one minute loving the idea and next minute loathing it. Meaning I would keep trying to force myself out of ruts instead of letting it come naturally. 

Then all of a sudden, and in it’s usual timely fashion, right at the last minute, it clicked. And it’s funny, because Pete would say to us that sometimes our first idea is quite often the one, but it takes you weeks to explore all other avenues and come back full circle. Which is kind of what happened last Thursday, 6 days before crunch time. We thought there’s no point in forcing a project when you have limited passion for it, even though it’s a nice idea. So we took the plunge, parked up our three weeks of solid work and now we are back to one of our first ideas which we love – if only we’d seen it earlier, although where’d the fun be in that. The curve wins again. 

3 days and counting, let’s shake the reins.