CREATE AND CONNECT

The new Karsh\Hagan website is up.

UPDATE: Whoa, lots of opinions on our site across the Internet. Justin McCammon likes it, and is even running poll. But the Egotist is not a fan.

Karsh\Hagan senior writer Matt Ingwalson was a guest on Scott Goodson’s lunchtime chats. Read the interview here.

Karsh\Hagan senior art director Sean Topping just got back from London, where he was working on a project with Framestore. Here are his reflections:

Framestore is the largest visual effects company in Europe. But we weren’t there working on motion graphics for broadcast; we were creating broadcast-quality interactive.

I’ve been doing this long enough to remember when interactive meant, “put your brochure on the Web.” It wasn’t that we couldn’t think of better applications, it was just that the end-user savvy and connection speeds weren’t there. Now that they are, we can finally get down to creating a broadcast-quality content, designed for an interactive environment.

We were working with newer group of Framestore called Framestore Design. The guys in the design group are charged with creating original motion graphics for broadcast, designing DVD menus and packaging, and exploring the boundaries of broadcast quality content over the internet. We were very excited to be the first client to hire Framestore to develop interactive content for web. And the guys were equally excited to share ideas and thoughts on how to leverage great broadcast quality with interactive online applications.

Now that the internet speeds are catching up with the quality of broadcast, the possibilities are wide open for all media. I can see all billboards becoming interactive LCD displays and webpages becoming interactive videos with nary a printed word. Think of watching a TV spot where the user can control the camera angle, light source, or even the setting, characters and outcome in realtime.

If you read my blog or Andy’s blog, you know that Karsh\Hagan’s work for 20/20 is slated to appear in the May/June issue of Communication Arts. There’s examples up on commarts.com now.

PSFK pointed us to a tool that lets website owners see their site as a graph. We plugged in this blog’s URL, as well as the agency homepage. See if you can guess which is which.

There’s a Colorado Creative Professionals group on Upcoming. Make sure to check it for a complete list of the latest events from organizations like the NDAC and ADCD.

It was a Saturday morning, and my wife and I had graciously agreed to watch my neighbor’s kids for a 6-hour period while he attended a wedding. Our houses are right next to each other and the kids are back and forth from house to house regularly. Since my boys have done their fair share of trashing the neighbor’s house, the least I could do was allow his girls to return the favor at mine. And I had assumed that four children, ages 4, 5, 7 and 8 could certainly entertain each other for the majority of the time, as long as they were well fed and watered, and had sufficient resources (e.g. board games, crayons, paper, flashlights, walkie-talkies, etc.).

After an hour of turning the basement into a fort – you remember, you take every blanket, sheet and towel in the house and somehow find a way to attach them to every chair, couch and table in the house to make a series of tunnels that resemble a crude subway system – they said “it.”

“Dad, we’re bored. We don’t know what to do.”

5 hours to go.

After I rattled off at least twenty ideas ranging from hide-and-seek to baking cookies to playing soccer outside, and after receiving the same response – “nah” – after each suggestion, I realized that I too had run out of ideas. So there I was with four children, all mentally, physically and emotionally capable of coming up with an idea, who essentially were stuck.

What do you do?

Go see a movie? Nah. After I buy tickets, popcorn, drinks and candy for the six of us, I would make a bigger splash just giving the kids the $100. How about the zoo? Oh that’s right, we did that last weekend. And as hard as I laughed watching a 40 ft giraffe catch drops of melting snow on his foot-long tongue as it fell from the roof of his 50 ft barn, the smell from that barn was just not right.

4 hours, 49 minutes to go.

Then my wife – both brilliant and beautiful - had the answer. A friend of hers had given us a family pass to the Denver Art Museum a week or so prior so we ran that one up the flag pole with the kids.

Touchdown.

What an incredible place for kids. Bubbles of light, Art Bingo, Cowboys and Indians, a station for designing your own post cards, and a good old-fashioned set of wooden blocks. What an incredible place for adults. Bubbles of light, Art Bingo, Cowboys and Indians, a station for designing your own post cards, and a good old-fashioned set of wooden blocks. I took at few photos with my iPhone of the things that inspired me.

6 hours, 39 minutes later, the neighbor is wondering where his kids are.

In our industry, we are only as good as our next great idea. It doesn’t matter how strong the last marketing campaign - or fort - was. It’s what we do next that matters most. Yet how many times have we found ourselves stuck? No matter how much data, or how many insights, or how much stimulus or how many people we throw at one of our client’s marketing challenges, sometimes we just hit a wall. We don’t know what to do. Or we too, get bored.

What do you do?

I used to be a much better writer. In college I would find a cozy nook amongst the stacks in the library where there was nobody having sex (too bad nobody goes to the library anymore), stare out at the dead trees and the cocoon of ice that encased them, and just let the writing come out from the middle me.

Spaghettis of infant light reach up from behind dank buildings and sloppy streets poking a buttonhole of hope in the fabric of my layered fear. Maybe this one will be the one who won’t allow me to live alone anymore. Thus, I endure.

But somehow, when you write for a living, slinging words for car dealerships and ski resorts and sometimes even the bottom of a box of beer, it takes all the romance out of it. I can’t later go home and drink tea at my computer and find something important, or even mildly interesting, to say. But in my early years, it just burst out. I had to frantically grab cocktail napkins to capture it all.

One night
as we took our evening meal together
separated by the silence and by
a single naked bulb suspended from the ceiling
(so that we sat facelessly facing each other)…

I can’t remember the rest of it, and I think I even butchered that part. The last poem I wrote, for better or for worse, was for my wedding day. Where, after just the right amount of wine, I stood up and read it in front of all my friends and family. It was something about “throw a shadow dance eat cake” and a reminder of how lucky you are if you’ve been loved. But you know, better.

My point? I haven’t written anything outside of work stuff in about eight years. And then, Matt asked me to contribute to this blog. Thanks Matt.

The problem with Twitter is that the ability to microblog passing thoughts discourages you from ever assembling them into narrative. Take my my caucus-night tweet:

Wow. Over fire code. Running out of sign in sheets. This is best caucus ever.

Just one little tweet. Probably meaningless. Probably should’ve come home and blogged about the whole night.

But maybe not. Because maybe individual narratives mean less than the collective narrative of our planet.

There is a raft of new services that attempt to compile tweets into memes that reflect America’s collective consciousness. Like TwitterLinkr. And Twemes. And the Google Maps/Twitter mashup that broadcast tweets in real time throughout Super Tuesday. (The map is here and a story is here.)

Most of these services have the word alpha or beta attached to them, so they’re claiming permission to screw up early and often. But I’m dying to know what it’ll be like to search a term like “climate change” and pour through the world’s ideas.

We are all in this together. And maybe our collective whispers will become something more interesting than synthesized recollections could ever be.

Cross-posted here.

Sometimes to Create and Connect you have to get out of the office and be among the people. Thanks to Emily’s rallying cry, a few of us connected with about 15,000 Denverites to meet and listen to Democratic Presidential hopeful candidate Barack Obama at Denver University yesterday.

The calm of the crowd outside was a sharp contrast to the electricity that filled the air when Barack walked into the Ritchie Center. Regardless of your politics, it’s pretty awesome to live in a county where politicians still come in person, shake hands and kiss babies and share their beliefs in hope that the crowd will agree with them.

The experience meant something different to each of us.

Emily:

It’s pretty amazing to experience something like this to see have a sense of community and the impact it will have on Denver i.e. DNC. We have something special that will be happing here in 7 months.

Vanessa

It’s huge to look at this distinguished, accomplished person of color with this extraordinary level of conviction and look at all the things he has worked on and had to overcome to get to this place of power. For me it was very moving to hear him articulate how he is going to be our partner, not just a leader that’s so far removed from his country and its people that his focus remains on things that aren’t relevant to our everyday lives. He spoke to things that matter to us, that we can be passionate about and connect through as a people. He was very authentic…adamant about the fact that he will always tell us what we need to hear not just what we want to hear. I want to change the world!

Jenny:

Even though I won’t be able to vote for 8 more years, it was very exciting to be to be part of the energy. It was powerful to be part of the sea of people coming together for one common purpose.

Jenny was reluctant to even sign the registration sheet for fear that she was claiming to be a registered voter and could be deported.

Meg:

As a fellow Democrat from Chicago, I spent childhood weekends stuffing envelopes and canvassing for people like McGovern and Mikva and hearing about JFK and Martin Luther King. So it was pretty cool to see Caroline Kennedy and hear about her confidence in Obama as being the candidate for the future.

Tuesday Feb. 5 is Super Tuesday and time to Caucus. More details on caucusing on kbco.com.