Crashing The One Show

Earlier this month Senior Designer Ramon Vasquez, Tony Fulgham of World Famous and I traveled to NYC to present our Seattle International Film Festival trailer at the One Show Creative Week. Winning a Bronze Pencil for the piece was a great honor, and we given the opportunity to give some insight into the concept and production behind the work. We were in the first group to present and had a total of three minutes to do so and screen the trailer. We did our best to make all of our points but Tony did get cut off mid sentence while talking about the actor’s ability to simulate an orgasm. We got some laughs, we got applause, and then we got to sit back and watch the other agencies present.

It was an inspiring and eye-opening experience.

Our LSD trip-inspired trailer for SIFF was admittedly odd, but it felt even more so when presented alongside a sari designed to teach the Hindi alphabet to women in Mumbai, an installation that preserves the personal stories of 9/11, a social campaign to empower prepubescent girls, and a toy that acts as asthma therapy for children. And that was just the work presented before noon! There is definitely a shift in the kind of work that is being recognized by the One Show and it is inspiring. No longer are our smartest creative minds limited to merely hawking products and services. Now we can hawk those products using an outdoor campaign where the media actual helps clean up a polluted river in Manila (yes, that was another morning presentation). The bar has been raised (and apparently it’s been raised by volunteers from Habitat for Humanity). It is increasingly hard to grab the attention of the judges with just creativity and craft. The work can’t just be good, it has to do good too.

Mark “Monkey” Watson is a creative director at Seattle-based WONGDOODY.