Ever wondered what happens when the door shuts on the world’s taxidermy collections?  Thanks to this video from The Erratic Man, we now know:

The single is the first from Worker Records – an internal label at BETC London – the younger British brother of the Parisian adfolk behind those Evian roller babies.

And that’s not all. If you’ve got a pet (either living or deceased) who you’d like to see warbling along to ‘Back In The Day’, you can do just that at Petchoir.com.

The creative team responsible for the taxidermised troubadours are a young placement duo, Mike Whiteside and Ben Robinson, who’ve managed to find the time for a quick chat with SSZ about their experiences, ambitions, and that video.

SSZ: So guys: where are you from and what has been your journey to date?

B&M: Well, Mike’s from Bournemouth and Ben’s from Reading. We met on the excellent Creative Advertising Course at the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham, which is always bit of a mouthful. That’s why we’ve now moved to London. Easier to say.

SSZ: How did you find yourselves at BETC? Are you finding the placement useful?

B&M: We exhibited at D&AD’s New Blood, which was visted by Neil Dawson, our creative director. Neil saw our work and must’ve liked it, which is surprising considering the focal piece was a gross spec ad we did for Veet for Men.

Anyway, we’re very glad he did and we’re learning a lot. It’s great for us that BETC isn’t a huge agency here yet. It means we’re learning from people who, in most agencies, it’d be hard to get any time at all with.

SSZ: Where did the inspiration for this taxidermy masterpiece come from? And where did you get all the critters?

B&M: We were briefed to come up with some album covers and posters, around the concept of ‘broken joy’. We scribbled down the taxidermy idea, half-formed along with a few others, on a piece of paper. Neil saw it and sort of went, ‘yeah! Let’s do that!’

The critters were all part of the collection at London Taxidermy, which is an amazing, if slightly unnerving, place. We were spotting new dead things all day and we think you could probably say the same if you were there for a whole year. That’d be a weird year.

SSZ: You guys are on placement at BETC right? How did it feel to have such an exciting creative brief so early on?

B&M: Yeah it’s been a really great project to be involved with. This is our first placement, so we dunno, maybe they’re all like this. But we suspect we’ve been pretty spoiled here on that front.

SSZ: It seems unusual that an ad agency would not only set up a record label but devote so much time to what is effectively an internal project. What do you think BETC are looking for out of this?

B&M: BETC’s got a fantastic attitude to creativity and they want to foster a really strong creative culture here. The office in France has set the bar incredibly high and the London office are keen to do the heritage justice and just make great things, some of which will be ads.

SSZ: 30,000 views in under a week – does this make you viral superstars yet? What are your ambitions and are you now addicted to the medium of the music video?

B&M: We’re really chuffed with how it’s going down. Saying that, we saw a video this morning of a dog with human hands eating Dairylea Dunkers. It had over 400,000 views so we’ve probably got a little way to go yet.

We don’t think the best creative stuff’s necessarily advertising, so we’d love to get involved with more projects like this in the future. For now though, we’re just enjoying learning and improving.

SSZ: Any advice to other young teams or single creatives? Any golden rules?

B&M: In one word, persist!! We’ve got more detailed advice on our blog though, so have a read.

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For more on Mike & Ben’s work, visit their website – the aptly-named www.mikeandben.co.uk.

Just got back from this event at the Wilmo in Clerkenwell: an eclectic selection of talks hosted by interactive experience agency Specialmoves. They included Katy Beale from Culture Hack, who helped start Coding for Kids, a group that is looking at ways to introduce programming into the education system which I think is hugely important if we want our kids to innovate in the future. Ben Richards from Jotta talked about the intersection between art and digital, showing off this epic water projection from Latitude Festival 2010, a whole year before Jordan Melo:

Ciaran Park from Specialmoves got technical on responsive web design, made the interesting point that designers are constrained in their thinking from the moment they set the page dimensions in Potatoshop. Then furniture designer Gareth Neal gave an epic talk about some fairly inept experimentation with CAD software that resulted in some serendipitously stunning designs, like this table with segments machined out to reveal the sexy curve of the legs:

His combination of computer design and hand finishing gives his machine-made work an individual lo-fi quality. The individual charm of bodging continued with Jane Unpronounceable-surname from Sugru, with her inspiring tale of the invention of the ‘next blu-tack’. Then there were some ‘young gun talks’: James from Hyper Island confirmed our views that it may be the best course ever, Mike from YCC told it how it is and our boy Jonny said a swear.

And they gave us pogs as beer tokens.

Over the past year They’ve pimped people’s profile pics, created customised royal plates and even commandeered an ice cream van to deliver to people’s doorsteps. Now, to celebrate the end of year 1, Poke have helped Orange bring back a popular item from their feed, Secret Portraits.

People describe themselves in one comment – they can either use the #SecretPortrait hashtag, or they can submit their description via the Facebook page – A bunch of illustrators then bring these descriptions to life.

Check out past illustrations here, then get tweeting yeah?

In this promo for Crytek’s new FPS ‘Crysis 2‘, a bunch of shady looking chaps got in a van and illegally projected the game onto various landmarks around London and Paris. The result? Loads of people got to try the game and by the looks of it they nearly got arrested. Rock and Roll man, rock and roll.

ps. the game is SICK. Black-ops beater.

The stand-out at last night’s IAB awards was comfortably this campaign for the mini countryman (frankly a pretty ugly car) – engaging audiences young, old and across the world with a simple challenge. We just wish we’d got a go in it ourselves. Congrats to Profero (and Ross from SSZ, who it turned out worked on the campaign) for a win well deserved.

ps. Kudos to the guy basically licking the fake windscreen/where all the sweaty mid-shopping-trip armpits have been wiped. Yum.

Howdy, so we’ve been keeping a slight radio silence over the last week or two, but don’t think we’ve been resting on our laurels, oh no. In fact we went … up north. I know. Like, further than Watford even. In a mad few days with D&AD we visited Newcastle and Leeds, holding portfolio crits, workshops and the odd lecture (like above yeah?).

We met some cracking students from unis spanning the breadth and length of the North (and bits of Scotland), even learning what an interactive media course gets up to (there’s some mind-boggling work coming out of Northumbria this year) and witnessing a guy spit his gum on another person’s iPad (mid Angry Birds), pick it up, pop it back in his gob and wander off down the train. Waste not want not.

We’ll follow this post with a couple of the students we met whose work shone, but rest assured the state of design education in the North is very much alive and kicking (and it’s WELL CHEAP!).

Wowzers. Lovely stuff from those talented bastards at The Mill. They have loads more work that’s not even in this reel too including this promo for series 5 of Skins and the BBC radio idents (Zane Lowe and a big button) – with literally hundreds of lovely case studies on it their website is well worth a look.

Last week, after a memorable trip up north, we held our London VS event. The industry team made a resurgence, however the overall victory still went to the Grads, winning 109-102 with standout performances especially in the drawing competitions. We managed to once again give away lots of prizes for such bizarre reasons as pegging, drawing vegetable-based superheroes, dance-offs, getting Stephen Seagal to endorse Aldi by doing in-store butchery and playing an R-rated game of Richard and Judy’s Midday Money. Cracking music from Dave Rudnick, flowing beers, foam shapes and yet more hand-drawn willies allowed everyone to get acquainted fully. Super.

To check out more London photos go here.

Our Liverpool VS night was a huge success, resulting in (amongst other things) rude sketches, wall sitting, bloody noses, free t-shirts, posters, magazines and books, a lot of beer, even more chat and many new acquaintances both young and old(er). We hope to go back to Liverpool in the near future, but for now our sights are well set on London’s equivalent next Tuesday. So far the grads are up 76 points to 53, so industry had better buck their ideas up.

To check out more Liverpool photos head to our flickr page.

Back in February we held an event called ‘VS’, allowing practicing creatives, graduates and students to face up in a fierce battle. Despite teams of equal numbers the grads crept ahead, excelling particularly in the artistic challenges (willy drawing being a forté).

It’s now about time to find out not only whether the pros can regain some honour but also which creative hub is more passionate and game for a laugh, Liverpool or London.

Amidst a haze of beer, chat and music, once again we will be encouraging participants to compete in micro-challenges, notching up valuable points for their teams, as well as some new additions of staged professional and student grudge matches and team challenges, with the usual prizes and giveaways throughout. Regardless there will be countless opportunities for those on both sides to meet and discuss the finer aspects of football, politics and the relative merits of various weights of Akzidenz Grotesk.

UPDATE: Here is a list of just some of the creative agencies coming along.

AMVBBDO
Dare
M&C Saatchi
Brave
BCL
Wunderman
Profero
My Agency
AKQA
Bibliotheque
Collective London
Furnace Digital
Morph London
A+B
Magpie Studio
Merrell
Mercy
OWT Creative
Bolland Lowe
Unfold
SB Studio
IAW
D&AD
LITFI
Plus a whole host of freelancers and illustrators and a tonne of students and grads for them to battle hailing from universities all over the UK.

Dates:

LIVERPOOL:
25th November 2010, 7.30pm
@ The Shipping Forecast
In association with Mercy, D&AD and Design Symposium North

LONDON
7th December 2010, 7pm
@ The Book Club, Shoreditch
In association with Mercy and D&AD

More details will be released in due course.

At just £3 in advance or £4 on the door, it’s a snip. All you need to do is pop to our shop and purchase yourself a delicious ticket. YUM.

BUY TICKETS

‘Director Thomas Hilland was asked to test drive the Nokia N8, and make a film that made the most of the smartphone’s impressive HD camera. The film features music by Kap Bambino, remote-controlled dragonflies, a stunning Norwegian landscape, and some men in colourful costume.’

Yeah, and the men have great beards/facial expressions and there are colourful fish. Isn’t it mental that just a few years ago Snake on the Nokia 5110 was the bees knees.

On Tuesday we were lucky to be able to go along to the first of Sanky’s offerings as president of our partners D&AD, this one presented by Danish design supergroup KiBiSi.

Made up of Bjarke Ingels, the young architectural maverick founder of BIG architects (front of the above image), Lars Holme of Kilo Design (back right) and Jens Martin of Skibstead Ideation (back left), these guys painted a picture of the future full of angular utopian cityscapes populated by floor-lit driverless cars as well as present day solutions of sustainable furniture and intelligent bicycles.

What became apparent though throughout the lecture was that rather than hypothetical spouting, this stuff was actually going to happen and these three gentlemen were at the forefront.

The section that really got me was the concept above from a project they are working on with Audi. A thin glass film coating (a tech that already exists) would be placed on city streets which, as well as providing massive amounts of sustainable energy, can be embedded with LEDs and sensors, allowing for a truly interactive experience. The implications on road safety and congestion as well as interactive advertising and gaming are pretty mind-boggling.

The next D&AD presidents lecture, Pecha Kucha, is on the 3rd of November and features a plethora of design luminaries including Neville Brody and Kate Moross. MIMO.

After a couple of months of reduced activity here at ShellsuitZombie towers (holidays, work commitments and suchlike) it seems appropriate to kick back into gear with this intensely claustrophobic spot for the treatment of psychosis, asking how long you would wait. They say:

“A bit like being under water, for someone experiencing psychosis things can seem different, but it can be hard for them to understand, explain or even notice. They might look the same on the surface, but underneath their world is changing.“

Check out the accompanying site here. Design and website by Venn Creative, based in lovely Cornwall (lucky bastards).

Thousands of logos animated into an award winning short film with stunning visuals and snappy screenplay.  Directed by talented Frenchmen H5, François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain.  Watch out for Big Boy’s wandering hands…

We might as well eh. Go to his webspace here.