HEAD BLOG

At Head First, something we are always mindful of being is outsiders. It may seem strange to say this when most of our work is taken up with conveying the excitement of being a Japanese Samurai, a rampaging Marine or a MotoGP rider. Who amongst us is not an outsider when it comes to such rarefied pursuits? Certainly those of you reading this as a person uninterested in any sort of gaming outside football or snap! might suggest that the games we are charged with promoting are more akin with simple candy at a store in that children (for who else buys such tartly coloured things anyway?) will be drawn to the biggest buzz or lumbered with the budget title bought for them by a well meaning grandparent.

Somewhere in between all of this lies the duty of the outsider agency. Understanding where that buzz is created (and just how much money it can take to generate) is only a tiny part. In the vast, interconnected web of our consumer lives the real effort goes in knowing the many different faces of the gamer and seeing the product as they would see it rather than how the product manager would.

Yet being an outsider isn’t as easy as it might at first appear. In reality the outsider agency must not only be an outsider, but every outsider. And what a lot of outsiders there are.

A child, a teenager, a father, a mother, a single twenty-something – even that list, quickly generated, can spiral out of control and, in reality, tells us nothing. Take one: the father. Who is he? Why is he looking to play a game? What is he looking for? Does he go to the cinema? Does he buy books? Did he play games as a child and so is familiar with terms and conventions easily as complex as those of the Internet (and there’s a future article in itself)?

A person could sit down to a multiplayer game of Metro 2033 and be paired with a person they would all but despise in real life. The markers that resonate enough for them to choose something as simple as a shirt will be wildly different which leads to choices in design as to what terminology to employ, what nods to make, what visual cues to activate.

In such a world the question of how alien the main player character is takes a backseat. Indeed understanding the intricacies of the product itself can also take a backseat as our audience becomes as alien and unknowable as any blue skinned warrior robot could ever be.

Here, the outsider agency must arm itself with wit and a genuine interest in portraying the open, honest coolness of a product and fire it into the hearts of whoever walks on this strange digital battlefield.

For me it was Blade Runner. The worlds of Star Trek, Star Wars and yes, even the giant of sci-fi: Blakes 7, didn’t manage alien in quite the same way. Their landscapes all seemed familiar, borrowed from the ordinary and polished or roughed up in order to appear different. Even Welsh quarries didn’t manage to pull it off properly.

Blade Runner was different. It wasn’t so much the spaceships and killer androids that made the world of Blade Runner so alien, so futuristic; it was the element of Japanese in it all.

Whether the film had quite the same effect to the Japanese, I can’t say (though I hear they go nuts for Blakes 7) but to me, young teenager as I was at the time, Blade Runner was a plausible vision of the future.

More spaceships wouldn’t have made it any more plausible, nor would more gibberish tech or plastic clothing.

All of this occurred to me just two paragraphs into Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.

The reason?

The feel of foreign.

The future can be two things: familiar (so I’m waiting for Ken Loach’s multi-million dollar space opera) or foreign. It is the latter that brings out our sense of wonder.

Just as Blade Runner forced us to experience the future through foreign eyes so is it important to retain your own outsider status when it comes to answering a brief. The world in which the client lives is not the same world in which the consumer lives. It can’t be.

The client is familiar with the sales targets and campaign aims. The client has bosses to please whether they are shareholders or marketing directors. The client is not going to be buying their own product.

Being foreign is an approach that ought to stay with you every day.

Understanding the client’s business is important, sure. But presumably the client has a pretty good grasp of her own business.

Understanding her customer, being her customer, well that’s what can deliver effective and creative thinking.

A cheap little app for the iPhone which was recommended to me by Matt Booth has got me looking at the world in a different way.

Just as the app itself had to look at the world differently.

It’s a camera app called Hipstamatic and anyone with a 3g will know that the camera on the iPhone isn’t something to throw away your Nikon over.

At just 1mb it is the sort of camera you avoid rather than include in your arsenal. It will do “ok” prints for a postcard but that’s about it.

So making use of it means making some big compromises if you like your photos glossy and printed onto canvas.

The makers of the app came up with an idea which makes perfect sense.

They modelled it on old style point and click cameras with old style film. That means you get a camera that adds in flaws of the kind you’d see by looking through your own childhood photos (I’m assuming you are born way before digital cameras came about).

It’s a fun way of making the most out of a camera with such limitations.

And it’s a great way of forcing yourself to look at the world differently.

I’ve been playing with black and white photography. I’ve done this on my dslr and enjoyed it well enough but now it’s a whole new thing. I’m looking more keenly at contrasts and compositions because I wonder what flaws they will produce once processes through Hipstamatic.

Waiting (sometimes even patiently) for the image to ‘develop’ is part of the fun because it means I can’t fire off twenty shots in a second and assume one has captured the moment.

Digital freed us all to become photographers. It’s been a wonderful gift and has produced amazing photos and amazing sites. But seeing and using Hipstamatic has made me understand what our perfect digital world loses in the rush for better quality images. It’s also taught me that dealing with obstacles in life is a route to producing amazing, insightful and thoughtful work.