Birds are wild about Swoop

I was going through some old ads and came across these. This was one of those briefs that no-one wanted to work on, the client wasn’t prepared to spend any money but we had a lot of fun. Some where on an old umat I have a classic of me acting out a script that Kes Gray and myself wrote. It is an experiment to see if the Dodo really is extinct. It features me in a white coat, bottle top glasses, a dish and a pack of wild bird food. Speaking to camera I ask, ‘Is the Dodo really extinct?’ Then I fill up the dish and wait. I wait for about thirty to forty seconds, shuffling, moving the dish slightly, trying not laugh but of course nothing happens, so I turn to camera and say ‘Must be’. That was it. Simple really. All in the performance. I also had another script featuring the now dead Rod Hull, this time without emu on the end of his arm. He passes Swoop in the super market and his arm starts to behave like the mad emu and go for the packet of swoop on the shelves. Would have been fun if the client had been brave enough to make them and not go for some bland snowman animation rip off instead. Not that I was bitter at all.

Tags: art director, conceptual advertising, kelvin tillinghast, print advertising, swoop, TV concepts, wild bird food, writer

Book stuff

Here are some sample chapters from ‘Anonymous brown paper title’, about a photographer who gets a job shooting a porn calendar. Followed by ‘Love Meister‘ which I’m in the process of starting to shape into a film script.

Wildwood sky

Just been reading Robert Holdstock’s Mythago cycle. I felt that this photo I took of a large oak in the backwoods of Sissinghurst Gardens captures the feeling of power within the primeval trees of Ryhope wood.

Tags: branches, connection, Holdstock, image, kelvin tillinghast, Kent, Mythago cycle, network, photograph, Ryhope wood, shadow, silhouette, Sissinghurst, tree, trunk, twigs, veins, web of life, wild wood, wood, woodland, woodland scene

A word on bad breath

The other day while I was sitting around thinking about words (like I do), it occurred to me that halitosis is a word that has been specifically designed to demonstrate that the utterer is a sufferer.

Tags: bad breath, comedy, halitosis, human observation, humour, observation, words

A collection of collectives

If you enjoy a little wordplay then check this site out. Not one of the best designed sites I’ve come across, but the content is rich and thought provoking.

Quite simply it is a site devoted to the collective noun. Not only does it list the more well-known ones like ‘murder of crows’ and the like, but it also allows people to put forward their own and if liked it gets posted with a credit.

Every now and again when I have a spare moment I have a crack at trying to get a collective noun in there. So far I have had no luck, must be quite tough criteria to get acknowledgement. One day.Here are a few I have come up with:

a jostle of commuters, a stride of pedestrians, an assumption of moralists, a leer of perverts, a fleece of con artists, a slump of drunks, a sniffle of colds, a jubilance of rejoicers, a spin of publicists

To see more >collective noun site

Tags: collective, collective noun, fun, grammar, language, lexicography, word, word play

Which is travels faster – the flu or the lame flu joke?

Things like the flu can spread fast. But here in the ether things spread so fast, it makes the actual subject of the jokes seem like it’s moving at a snails pace. As any comedian will tell you a bad joke can kill the mood in a room faster than a sneeze, and a good one can do the global rounds faster than it actually takes someone to think it up in the first place. There are plenty out there infecting the social networks and people’s inboxes, so watch out. 

>see tracker

Tags: bad jokes, commentrary, google tracker, humour, jokes, swine flu

Interview with a Zombie

whhhaaaaoaoaoaffffffaaahhahahahaaaaaaaaaaaa…..grrrrrgagagaggggggfffffaaaaaaaaaaahhaaaahhaa woooooohhhaaaaaathrasts….ssshssssssshhsrraraaraaaaaaaaagraaaawahaaa…rwaaazxz…fro…fraxtch…negggraaaaahaaa…whhhhaaaaaaagraxatra… farh… farh…whha…whaaa.. tragrawwwwwww…whoaaaaaah… ….. …..wha…. fraw….ghraffffff…. … @x*thrat…. whoaaaa…. ughhhhh…urwoahaaaa…sssshraw…..

(interview terminated at this point due to increase in life threatening circumstances).

Tags: horror genre, humour, interview, journalism, writing, zombie