We've been rehearsing since September.
Honing our skills.
Performing mental acrobatics on 200 briefs every day since September.
Now it's time to leave the Big Top at Watford and creatively perform in the real world.
All the venues were ready for us.
The seats are booked.
The Pentels are moist.
It's showtime !
We parked the caravan at The&partnership.
We juggled a number of rather tricky live briefs from top lovely team Brody and Owen.
On Wednesday, Angus Vine a Creative Director gave us a brief to write and film one minute comedy videos in a day.
The clowns sprung in to action.
The films were turned around in a day and presented first thing on Thursday.
A huge hug to Kristina and Elena for reserving the seats and organising some lovely people to look after us.
Josh and Donya's take on the word Moustache.
The winning film by Alex Binding.
Creative maestro Matt Lee class of 1996 and now Deputy Executive Creative Director sat down with me over a cuppa and we planned the week's show.
We wanted action, excitement and fun.
So we set Mercedes, Valentines Day, Turkish Delight, Kew Gardens and The Army.
They had a safety net of tutorials on Tuesday. Most of the ideas came crashing down without a safety net.
On Wednesday, Matt and I alongside M&C placement team
Will and Rowan ran speed crits on first thoughts. Each Watford team had 5 minutes to run through all their ideas.
Thursday was spent executing the best ideas.
We returned to the agency for the final show.
Matt Lee was a tough audience.
There was a lot of simple clear thinking on show.
And not enough amazing acts of quirky mental agility.
We left the agency with a weekend of extra rehearsals.
17/2//2020 AMVBBDO
A very similar week to the previous one.
A bunch of challenges were set by our hosts Creative Directors Prabs and Jamie.
Tuesday was practice time at the Festival Hall .
It was half term and The Hall had become Babyland.
Hundreds of toddlers and babies crawling around the floor.
It was a shame the students weren't working on Pampers.
Instead the briefs were Jaffa Cakes, Plenty, Comedy Central and Currys.
On Wednesday we had a quick 5 minute run through of all the ideas with Prabs and Jamie ably assisted by agency creative Oli Frost.
We all returned on Friday to present our finished campaigns.
Better than last week?
The ideas were clearer, stronger and more lateral.
The executions, however, could have been a lot better.
Yep, a much improved display from Cirque De Creative.
24/2/2020. Pablo.
Tom Gong senior writer, threw a bunch of live tasks our way. He also asked the group to make a comedy film based on the word 'carrot'. Pablo didn't have room for the acrobats to practice so worked off site.
2/3/2020. Rehearsal Week. Festival Hall.
Our Creative show only had one booking this week.
A day with Atomic. The lovely ECD's Dave and Guy booked us for the day to work on a brief for Greater Anglia Railways.
We worked offsite and returned to present at 6.00pm.
9/3/2020. Grey.
The Tour Bus headed off to Hatton Garden where we took the Creative Troupe to Grey. This week, the students were given a Pringles brief to crack.
Wednesday night we somersaulted up to Pablo where we presented the carrot films and print campaigns to ex students, E.C.D. Dan Watts, Nathalie Gordon and team Claire&Tom.
The films went down well.The one word response from Dan on all of the films was, 'funny.'
Here are two that went down particularly well from Team AliPali.
The evening ended with a standing ovation for Dan Watts.
After a successful 18 years working for such amazing agencies as 180 Amsterdam, Campbell Doyle Dye, Fallon, CHI and Channel 4 Dan was finally awarded his Watford Diploma.
16/3/2020. Saatchis.
