My World of the Dead

The last few months have been full of the Patricia Cornwell competition for me!

There have been exciting off-site meetings (I obviously don’t get out much), venturing up to Channel Five’s offices to discuss creative ideas for the pre-promotional ads (which were then turned around with a speed and professionalism that was quite astonishing in order to get them on-air in time for the launch early in the new year).

There have been countless meetings with Bob and Dave from Hyptv who have put in a huge amount of work to this project really above and beyond their invoice!

They have been a key part of making this competition as successful as it has been, and we'll go on to work with them again on our TV ad for Death Message. Hoorah for them.

Then came the coordination of the publicity with Kate from Colman Getty via lots of phone calls.

I have since realised that when I put together the working schedule for the competition, I really hadn’t taken Kate’s media deadlines into consideration! 

Who ever knew there would be quite so much to think about.

The week before the shortlisting was tense, we hadn’t received as many short film entries as we would have liked.

However I think everyone was waiting until the last minute to upload their entries, possibly so that others couldn’t nick their ideas!

In the last two hours before the competition officially closed there was nothing short of an avalanche of entries.

Although this was fantastic, it made our task of shortlisting even more tricky! We ended up with over two hundred entries to judge, and the standard was high.

I set aside practically a whole day in order to read through all the scripts and storyboards, and view the films.

I have to admit I had had a bit of a favourite all along, Body Bag by Paul Jeffries, which made it onto our long list.

But in the end there were a few entries which we all agreed stood out from the rest – as well as doing the job of getting the positioning of the book just right.

We couldn’t guess which one Patricia Cornwell would choose, but everyone was delighted with her choice, and having now met the winner, student Jamie Childs, we couldn’t be more pleased.

Jamie created the ad in his bedroom, when we had supposed he had used loads of equipment from his media course: a fact which amazed us all!

He is obviously a very talented, creative and entrepreneurial young man and being just partly responsible for helping to get his work in front of professionals was just another upside to this competition.

Now we just have to guide the ad through BACC clearance (fingers crossed)

All in all I’ve had a lot of fun.

Its been a lot of work, but running this competition has been a hugely enjoyable learning curve with lots of positives for lots of people!

And we have a great ad at the end of it.

I can’t wait to see it air on national TV on 18th April!

Posted 19/03/2008 15:40:56 by Emma Williams, Marketing Executive with 1 comments.