James Purdy

I designed, art directed and animated social and environmental content for the D&AD 2018 New Blood Academy in collaboration with Inga Ziemele.

The intention was to divert the branding from that year’s New Blood Awards created by Hako, and turn it into something a bit more rough around the edges and youthful to reflect the youthful experience of the academy attendees.

My concept for the Academy’s branding that year was meant to be a reflection on the quick and dirty nature of group creative work, iterating and altering as things progress.

Instead of directly mirroring the pencil and post-it experiences of the attendees, I opted for an unapologetically, unpolished digital look.

Here’s a roundup of the IG Stories we created and posted from week 1 of the 2 week academy.

Google Pixel was the 2018 Academy’s main partner. A lot of content we captured was a mix of Google Pixel video shot using a gimbal and Instax photos.

Some of the separated story clips are embedded lower on this page in their original looping form.

As someone who had attended the academy in 2014, I’d remembered the Academy trying and failing to get students to generate content for their social page.

When I joined the team running the academy in 2017 I brought the idea of using disposable cameras to entice the students to document their experiences. We ended up partnering with Kodak and getting 50 disposable cameras to hand out to the 50 students.

Processing fees for film scanning and development were quite high and we ended up with more content than we really needed.

For the 2018 Academy I chose to pass around an Instax camera, which solved the issues from the previous year, while retaining the nostalgic feeling that analog photography brings to the table.

Microsoft was a sponsor of the 2018 New Blood Awards and had left D&AD with a literal pile of Surface Book 2 laptops to use as they saw fit for the festival.

Still in possession of them during the academy I saw an opportunity to create a video wall comprised of Surface Books playing this clip. It turned out quite well in the end but was impossible to document in situ.

This was an internal promo video created for the academy attendees to tease a private memories video full of content from the 2 week course.

This piece diverted again from our public facing branding in favor of a fresher, more polished yet still chaotic look to connect with the attendees.

For me it was quite fun to animate, texture, and render the 3D Google Pixel seen here in C4D.

Google Pixel was a sponsor of the academy that year and quite a bit of content had been captured on 2 devices provided by Google.

If you watched the full Round Up of Week 1 video above, these are just the separate story clips presented in their original looping format.