Posts Tagged SXSW 2010

Last month, Zoic Studios’ executive creative director Loni Peristere gave a presentation at SXSW Interactive 2010 in Austin, Texas. In the following video, he discusses the relationship between ideas and technology; encouraging clients to take risks; and how technology now allows anyone with a great idea to produce a professional product.

A transcript of the video follows; the remarks were extemporaneous.

Any great thing comes first from a great idea. And a great idea really is the evolution of any process. You can talk until you’re blue in the face about technology, innovation, Internet and interactive, and social media, and you can say all those things until you’re blue in the face; but what it comes down to is a creative concept that has a need that doesn’t exist, and it’s finding a partner in the right technology that works for that creative idea.

I mean, at a very simple level, when you’re a carpenter sometimes you use a hammer to put a nail in, but sometimes you use a screwdriver. They get the same job done, but they get them done in a different way with a different effect. And I think that, again, starting at the idea first, and really utilizing the tools of the ability to communicate with the world, and the tools of instant feedback to create something new, is really what it’s about. It comes right down to the idea, and that’s what we have to build upon.

How do you get a client to take a leap of faith?

That is where personal relationships really come into play. How do you get people to take a leap of faith and creatively destruct boundaries? Well, it comes with trust, so it’s a relationship that’s built on years of success doing other things. And it’s built on trial and error. It’s built on exploration, and “taking a flyer.” We are constantly taking flyers, and I know that can be expensive and trying at times, but if you combine trust with taking a risk – which is how Killzone happened, it was taking a risk, and really Guerrilla Games took a giant risk by saying that they could produce this spot, and they produced the spot. It was Jan van Beek and his crew in Amsterdam that made Killzone 2 happen; it was them taking a flyer to change the way that advertising was going to work, based on a concept that Deustch had. I was just fortunate to come along for the ride and make a cool bullet shoot across the thing.

The power of creativity lies in the passion of the user

What’s really good in the world of what we do today in advertising is that, from a production standpoint, you can go to the store and pick up a viable HD camera for $1,300 with professional lenses, which gives you a product that’s as good as anything on the air. You can download editing software that costs hundreds of dollars instead of thousands of dollars. You can download visual effects software that costs hundreds of dollars instead of thousands of dollars. You can download Flash tools for hundreds of dollars instead of thousands of dollars, and literally you can make your own studio. You can have audio equipment, same deal. The technology in Moore’s Law has put the power of creativity in the passion of the user.

So how does one create their spec work? You just gosh darn do it. And you just get up there and do it. And when I started at 38 years of age, gosh it seems so long ago in 1996, you know, I had to go learn the Flame at night – and I never really learned the Flame, I tried, but it took too long because I also had to learn to use Excel spreadsheets to track things, and I had to learn to how to monitor QuickBooks, and all this all this kind of crazy antiquated stuff. Today you don’t need to do any of that because it’s all given to you in software.

So if you are passionate and persistent enough, if you have the right creative idea, you just make it happen.
As a learning experience, you just absorb what your passion is. If you want to be Steven Spielberg, you watch Steve Spielberg movies. If you want to be Ridley Scott, you watch Ridley Scott movies. If you want to be Jeff Bezos, do that – I don’t know that. But if you want to be Bill Gates, you work with the highest in computing software. You immerse yourself in that. There’s a really great book out there, and I’m going to stump for Malcolm Gladwell because this book Outliers really hits it right on the head. It’s practice that makes perfect, and that cliché really rings true. It’s the 10,000 hours of doing what you do really really well. So if you want to be a filmmaker, make films. If you want to make web content, make web content. If you want to make a game, make a game. And that can start at the moat basic level by practicing by learning from the best around you, and the good news is that the web provides that to you instantly.

More info: “Zoic’s Loni Peristere to Present ‘The Future is Now: Immersive Advertising as Gameplay’ at SXSW Conference” on IDYE; “Zoic’s Loni Peristere Discusses How to Make Your Creative Ideas Happen at SXSWi” on Wiredrive; the Wiredrive SXSW microsite.