February 2012

Seeing as Parliament Hill just headed back to work this week, we thought we’d get back to 5+!

We’re hitting the ground running this year with our first installment of 2012 from our lovely friend, Jorgen Stovne. Jorgen has been a client of ours from his early days at DDB and we have many opportunities to work on great projects together.

Enjoy!

Jorgen © Chris Gordaneer

Norwegian Nature
My parents took me on my first ski trip when I was three. The following decade was spent in a continuous whine as I complained my way through every hike they made me go on. There was always another mountain to climb, or a forgotten cottage to go to. Not until I grew up did I realise how much I loved hiking. And it wasn’t until I moved to Toronto that I understood how lucky I was to have such gorgeous landscapes on my doorstep. Hiking to me is what reformatting is to a computer; it reorganizes content and makes the brain work faster. Though I’ve tried some trips here in Ontario, I find myself longing for the midnight sun and endless horizons I’ve come to love back home.

The TTC
In the absence of proper fjords and unexplored wilderness where I could reformat my brain, I found a great backup: the city’s public transit system. The trek between Kipling and Bloor/Yonge always seems to cleanse my mind, and allows me to distill the problem of most creative challenges. Maybe it’s the lull of the train that puts my brain into the right frame of mind. It’s like being in a really boring lecture in school when your brain suddenly yells: “I feel like being creative. Please start doodling!”

Film Scores
Film music is written to create a mood and an atmosphere. With no distracting lyrics, they put you in the right mood for whatever inspiration you need. Losing myself in a score is probably one of my oldest forms of inspiration and it’s a source that keeps growing with every new movie released.

Tip: Grooveshark is an amazing (and legal) site for listening to music for free. I often make different playlists using different movie soundtracks for different moods. Let me recommend “The Fountain” by Clint Mansell, or the score to “Inception”. My secret listening pleasure right now is actually the track “Test Drive” from “How to Train Your Dragon”. Sure, that probably puts me at the mental level of a 10-year-old. But it’s a very happy 10-year-old!

Old-Fashioned Games
Gaming, to me, is almost a way of life. I’ve never been good at video gaming, but playing anything that requires rolling a dice always gets me excited. And if I can somehow pour some creative thinking into the game, I’m sold. As a teenager, I would sit for days constructing elaborate plots for my role-playing group of friends. I would draw the maps, prepare a playlist as the night’s “soundtrack”, rehearse the voices of different characters, calculate the game mechanisms against the group’s strength, consider if the mood of the plot would fit with the composition of the group’s personalities and interests…Yes, I was Norway’s answer to Steve Urkel.

Comic Books
Superheroes were never a big hit in Norway. Maybe due to some poorly-translated names. “Batman” was named “The Lightning Wing”, for example. The fact that he was wearing a bat costume was just a sidenote. Instead, we had Franco-Belgian comics and everything in between. These would appear once every two or three years, and thus had a really high quality to them. They were works of art and it always fascinated me how the author and artist worked together to present their story in the best possible way. I feel like I’m learning or noticing something new every time I read one. My all-time favourite must be the Danish comic Valhalla by Peter Madsen. It’s a loose re-telling of Norse mythology, spanning fifteen issues. It took thirty years to complete. Much like my latest advertising campaign.

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