Charlotte from CULT LDN

 

Tuesday was a productive day. I connected with Charlotte, the strategist from CULT London and we managed to jump on a call. To be honest, I wasn't even expecting anyone to get back to me. I messaged her on LinkedIn and within 30 mins, she got back to me saying that she is happy to answer any questions on being a strategist and to go through my portfolio on Wednesday. I find that while I'm leaning into art, I do enjoy finding insights, strategy and stuff. Turns out being a strategist isn't as boring as it sounds. 

Since I was so nervous, I even prepared a script in case I missed out anything. What I did was that I put together some slides with 3 of my projects on it, and a bit on my passion project. Previously when I was doing an internship in Singapore, the first question that my creative director asked during the job interview was: 'Apart from work, what else do you enjoy doing?' I ended up talking to him for 10 mins about my passion. I guess sometimes creative directors are tired of talking about projects and stuff all the time, maybe they wanted to talk about something else instead and to get to know young creatives in person. However, that passion died down so this time with Charlotte, I found another passion to talk about.

I had an interesting talk with her. I think she enjoyed the story that I presented on my slides and commented on some of my projects and how to take it further. At the end of everything, she even kindly send me more links and references to read on. She commented more on the thinking process behind the idea rather than the execution itself. 

This was a project that I previously worked on  long before I came to Leeds Art Uni. It was a campaign on reducing plastic pollution. 

The idea was 'What if we gave an alternate twist to fairy tales? The Little Mermaid who rather come out of the waters because the sea was too polluted

So I redesign the book cover since my target audience was children and children knew these stories by heart

Some notes that I have taken: 

1. Charlotte mentioned that no roles are fixed. This is not rocket science. People in the agency make switches or do rotation and it is common to see such a thing happening. I foresee myself doing such rotation as well. I don't think I would stick to being an art director for life.

2. She said that doing research is satisfying - finding insights and proposition and fitting everything up like a puzzle. I completely agree with this since it does make me satisfied to see my big idea come out and when I read everything out, it makes so much sense.

3. I asked about this Future Generation program that CULT is organising. I think it is an amazing idea to connect with different mentors and mentees together to share their portfolio. I've sign up for it as well mainly because I have questions about my portfolio that I would like to talk to an art director about. However, I discovered it too late and the dateline has past...... 

Still, I dropped an email, hopefully they will take pity on a pandemic graduate and let me in.

What stuck with me most was the thinking technique that CULT uses. I find that the 'What if...' thinking technique very conceptual and difficult to visualise. What if clients wanted a more realistic solution? How would the idea then launch? What mediums are we using to launch it? This was a problem that I had when I was working on the 21GRAMS brief. I cannot see how our idea would launch at the moment because it was just words. Sometimes, when the idea is very wordy, people don't bother trying to understand anymore. 

Charlotte then explained that they used a 1- page mood board, showing the 'launch moment' and the 'components' to the launch. Perhaps they used more reference image to go about explaining? 

But, I'm a traditional person who likes to see posters and stuff. However, I do get what she meant when it is an idea that involves a difficult mock-up like using VR or AI, so mood board can easily demonstrate the idea instead.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to the thought process behind it. It seems during the job interview of a strategist, sometimes they would even get young creatives to do a short task (10 slides) to show their research and thinking behind a on-the-spot-brief.

I was very grateful to her anyway and thanked her again after the talk for her time. Hopefully, the next person I get to connect and speak with would be an art director because I would like to know how else can I improve my portfolio and my art direction.