Fred Deakin partners with a top global agency to bridge the growing gulf between education and the creative industry in this pioneering documentary film by Paul Wyatt.
This half-hour creative film, produced in association with University of the Arts and Mother London, was launched on Halloween at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden, and we have the online premiere right here on Creative Bloq – but first its creator Paul Wyatt introduces the film.
Paul Wyatt
"We're looking to push you out of your comfort zone, so you can learn something."
That's a key part of UAL Professor of interactive digital arts, Fred Deakin's opening gambit for 'The Workshop', a film which brings together 20 UAL students from across disciplines and puts them into creative agency Mother for two weeks.
There they have to learn to collaborate in order to run their own design studio and produce ideas with the help of a unique creative process, feedback from Mother creatives and a lot of hard work – lots and lots of hard work.
They'd then face the daunting task at the end of the two weeks of showcasing their ideas in front of the assembled Mother creatives, UAL brass, family and friends at an event Mother would hold in their event space.
Fred Deakin
Alongside Nat Hunter and Alex Maclean, Fred ran Airside for 14 years between 1998 and 2012. BAFTA and D&AD award-winning Airside were the ultimate multi-disciplined agency working across branding, illustration, digital, animation and anything else they could think of. Fred brought a lot of that creative and entrepreneurial spirt into working with the students – most of whom were unsure about the collaborative process and inexperienced when it came to sharing and developing ideas together.
When I was invited by Fred to come along and point a camera at all this I knew we were in for something a little bit different. We have a terrible habit in this business of making creative work look too easy. We somehow feel ashamed if an idea seemed like hard work.
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The idea that we roll out of bed, come up with something and launch a global phenomenon by lunchtime never actually happens (unless of course it's a cat video and your cat is really, really cute). As soon as a creative appears in a magazine all that hard work is suddenly truncated. What this does is devalue what we do and part of the reason for making a half hour documentary about this process was to show the craft and graft of creative work.
Would these students collaborate? How would they react to stepping into the real world creative industry? Would it be the most car crash of creative exercises ever? Would the ideas be any good?
