It's book crit time again...

Last week Vicky visited St Albans again for a few days so we could go through our book, compare the work we'd done and go to a couple of book crits in London.

I thought it would be a lot more difficult to work seperately and talk over the phone but I think we're coping quite well. Obviously it would be much easier if we could meet up every week, but neither of us has any money booooooooo.

When Vicky arrives we always have a little show and tell, showing all the drawn up ideas we've been emaiing, texting and calling about for weeks and telling each other what we think. It's a tight squeeze to sleep two people in my bedroom, and probably a fairly boring trip for Vicky (I don't have a T.V. signal in my room), but the hard work and sacrifice will pay off eventually.

Last week we spent day one on Tottenham Court Road, firstly going to see the new Twilight film - Eclipse. I am an unashamed fan of the books and I have to say the film was OK, and probably good for the people who don't read the books. Personally I think it lacked some of the humour that was in the book, for those who know them well, I'm referring to that tent scene.

Later on we dropped into Saatchi & Saatchi to see a team. We had our book crit out in the large reception area. I've always dreaded having such an exposed crit but it was actually a lot more relaxed and gave us a lot more to look at while they were going through our work. We had some really constructive comments as always and got feedback along the lines of "your ideas are great but you're just not pushing them far enough". We shall be revisiting Saatchi's (hopefully) in about a month, so until then we will be "pushing" everything as far as we can go.

The next day we went to see our mate Brittony - Check out her blog
she has moved into a house in Tottenham with some of the Dutch guys from our course. We were pleasantly suprised by the house and the area, in fact we were probably a little bit jealous of all their Ikea goodies.

Later on we went to Farringdon to visit an agency called Muirhoward, who are a relatively small agency that are responsible for those great HSBC "world's bank" ads:

HSBC 30sec TV AD - Power of 8 from muirhoward on Vimeo.

We saw the creative director who was a really inspiring guy and obviously lives for advertising. He seemed really enthusiatic about all our work and offered some great ideas of his own. After showing him the portfolio he went and brought us some of the work he had worked on and we had an interesting chat about Crystal Palace and Ikea. Vicky and I both feel like he was on the same 'wavelength' as us and would love to get offered some work there! He said he'd get back to us so fingers crossed.

Round 2

On Monday and Tuesday we spent some more time daaahhnn in Landan for a few book crits. We began the week with a meeting at CHI & Partners. Although they don't offer placements the guys we saw were really positive about our book and gave us some great ideas to push our work further. The meeting was slightly tarred by the fact that I ordered a 'Cup of tea' from their coffee shop, only to receive a cappuccino. I was too embarrassed to say anything and proceeded to sip disgusting coffee throughout the book crit (silly me).

We then made our way to Farringdon to meet with the CEO of a start-up agency called London Advertising - www.londonadvertising.com. He seemed to like our ideas but picked us up a few times on presentation, which was odd as CHI had said: "wow, your book is so much neater than mine was". However, he did say he would like to see us again and that he found our book interesting.

After a short trip to Spaghetti House (yum), Vicky and I made our way to Saatchi & Saatchi. Through some very posh steel doors where we were told to wait in the very clean reception area, we were given clip on name badges, which we attached while looking at a wall stacked with yellow and black pencils.

We were taken upstairs to the creative department by Jonathan (his partner was away). He took a long time going through our book and getting us to talk about our work, while giving us some very useful tips and advice on how to get more from our ideas. He seemed to pick up on some obvious ideas that we hadn't ever thought of and gave us a very long to-do list to complete for next time. He said he'd love to see us again as he thought our ideas were great and he wanted to help us get better !

The next day we visited our first all-digital agency, AKQA. We were taken into the canteen for our book crit and had a really funny chat with the team. They went through every campaign, even though not all of them were digital and told us it would be great if we could come up with something digital for all our briefs. This all took place while about 20 people were singing happy birthday to a colleague next to us.

They gave us ways to improve and some really interesting thoughts on digital. When you should use certian social networking sites, how you should use them, getting the right tone of voice, etc... They were so friendly that they actually thanked us for finding the time to see them! We'll definately be going back to see them.