Creative Lightning
At the beginning of March I traveled back to my old alma mater, Oklahoma State University, to be a judge for the 2008 Creative Lightning Awards. The competition, run by the OSU Ad Club, was open to all undergraduate students of Oklahoma higher education schools.
I was told that accounting and engineering majors made up a large chunk of the entries, interestingly enough.
I got to take a look at a wide variety of work, ranging from advertising and design to photography and even filmmaking. Obviously some of the work was done as student assignments for design or advertising classes, but as we got into the photography and filmmaking categories, we started getting into work that was born solely from creative passion. These were my favorite pieces because they truly had soul.
Judging was really tough because of the fact that you had so many people from different backgrounds submitting work. I can’t necessarily fault an accounting student for having ill-informed typography choices in a poster they designed, but when it’s in competition you’ve got to take that into consideration. Given the varied design backgrounds of the entrants, I (like many of the judges) first judged the work on the big idea and then filtered down to the executional details.
Some of the work that stood out in my mind included some HDR photography of small Oklahoma towns, a fantastic chiaroscuro photograph of a lariateer on horseback, and a really nice packaging design for a yard gnome-like product.
Since I was really into making digital shorts when I was in college (back when it took someone an hour to download your 60 second Quicktime) I paid particular attention to the broadcast category. There was a hilariously eclectic animated piece about a cat singing to the moon. In my judge’s notes I mentioned that the video really needs to be on YouTube because it would get a million views. A quick check of the site showed the creator unfortunately has not taken my advice.
Another stand-out in that category was a DVD filled with interpretations of Shakespeare plays, each shot in different cinematic styles. Forgive me for not remembering which plays went with which style, but we saw silent film, French horror, and 70′s heroin chic just to name a few. All were elaborately and expertly cast, art directed, musically supervised, and edited. There was a lot of time and skill put into this disc and it showed.
You’d think that by my description of the DVD we had a cut and dried Best of Show. Not true. It was certainly a front runner in many judges’ minds, but again most of us looked to see if it exemplified the big idea. Sure, it was well done and certainly worthy of Best of Broadcast, but film interpretations of Shakespeare are nothing new, so we moved on.
We did have two judges from the same agency that consistently gave dissenting opinions from the rest of us in nearly very category, which was fine, but I think their expectations of the day may have been off a little. I think they were expecting the competition to be solely for advertising students and not for student body creativity. They also ran their judging through the “would I hire this person?” filter, mostly because I think they were there trying to find names of people they could hire for their design boutique.
However, majority ruled, and a big idea won over slick execution for Best of Show. Emma Adair’s poster for OSU Counseling Services won the majority of us over with its simplicity and impact. It wasn’t the slickest piece in the competition but it certainly was the smartest.
We judges did feel kind of bad for her though. You see, Emma was the Ad Club member who was in charge of organizing the competition. I will attest to anyone that asks that the award was given to the person most deserving of it. The girl has great ideas.
I was disappointed that there weren’t more interactive entries. There was only one, a Quicktime VR tour of the entrant’s old high school. It was OK. I guess I went into the day hoping to be inspired by some mashup that some dorm buddies came up with over the past semester, but no such luck.
It’s too bad that OSU didn’t have the Creative Lightning Awards when I was in college. I would have certainly entered my short films. Who knows how pieces like Look Who’s Hawking or Sugar Frosted Crack would have gone over with the judges 11 years ago? I think I probably have a pretty good idea.