Going loopy

I've just been watching a video shot in a club near where I live, The Ocean Rooms, and I was sitting thinking 'blimey this is a long video...' until I realised I'd been watching a loop for about 15 minutes.

I'm intrigued by the graphics used on the club's website - you can't walk through Brighton without being given a hundred flyers for the different clubs the city seems to possess (quite where they all are I haven't figured out) - we seem to be looping in print terms too. Capital letters and tight (if not negative) leading seem to be de rigeur at the moment; takes me back to when I tried to get the company I worked for as an in-house designer kicking and screaming into the 1990s graphically-speaking. I found that I had to be really subtle as any 'major' advances were usually rejected outright by some stuffy director who thought wood-panelled walls were a sign of distinction. My colleagues and I used to try to sneak in 'radical' design ideas and see what we could get away with.

My best ones were film spoofs - the company was/is the world's largest seller of building materials and so I'd have to sell such exciting things as bath plugs, copper pipes and toilets. Biggest career killer you could ask for, I suppose! But I swapped an 'approved' design for the bath plug ad as it went to press for an 'Independence Day' spoof (invading bath plugs! Lasers and everything!) that actually went down very well, and an ad for compact kitchens for studio flats became a 'Honey I Shrunk the Kitchen!' spoof complete with screaming 1950s woman and zany spiral background.

If I'd asked for approval I'd never have got it, so I took these gambles and they paid off - which sort of took the fun out of it. So much so I started getting bored. My farewell ad was for (wait for it) urinals and cubicles that came pre-packaged in a box and were called (it gets better) 'cubicles in a box' - they pay people to come up with these names, you know. If I hadn't just resigned I would have done at this point...

So I did something wowzer in Bryce, some sort of wooden crate with rays of smoky light coming out of the top and a urinal and cubical coming out with a forced perspective. I mean, how do you make these things exciting?! My master stroke though was the title 'Cubicles in a box!' which I rendered using the new Eye Candy filter we'd got for Photoshop which was made to look just like someone had pissed it all over the floor...

Oh how we laughed when no one spotted it. Probably 'cos it didn't really look like pee at all, but we knew that's what I'd intended.

You had to be there.