Busy day!

A little bit of agency two-timing went on today, but in the nice, dirty, smutty "I like it!" kind of way.

Around early December we'd caught up with Stephen at AND Partners who was handling their account with Warrington Borough Transport, as we'd been told before we left our placement there in October that the client was putting through some of the work we'd done, so we checked in to see how it was going. We were assured it was all still going ahead and that more would be happening come the New Year. So, like the persistent rottweilers we are, we continued to pester Ste every so often to see where it was all up to, and were very happy when last month he suggested we join them for the shoot once it'd been arranged. As you can imagine, the weather somewhat hampered the plans for a good few weeks, but around lunchtime yesterday, Ste emailed us to ask if we'd be free at very short notice to join them on the shoot today. Cue excitement! We checked with Paul at TBWA first, and gave Ste our big "Yay!" verdict.

So this morning we headed to Warrington to meet with Ste and Lee from AND Partners, as well as the photographer and his assistant, and set out in our very own bus (designated driver and all!)

The bus in question

We won't say too much right now, as the shots are currently with the photographer for retouching before AND Partners can set about their ad-producing magic, but we were really pleased to find that in the 4 months since we last set eyes on our concepts, not one thing had been altered. Of course we won't be at AND Partners to oversee the final stage, but it's been great to go on our first shoot and to see how the photographer had to set about interpretating and accomodating the idea as much as possible into the images he took, not to mention finding the perfect setting for the shots in the first place! Admittedly it's not as flashy and showbiz as you imagine it to be before you ever go on a shoot, but we certainly had a laugh and just plain enjoyed being able to see another stage of the whole process. No doubt the ads will be appearing on here just as soon as is possible!

Lee taking in the view

A change of location

Sarah getting her hands dirty

After randomly ending up as models for some additional shots being taken (yes, me and Sarah may even be FEATURING in an ad too, albeit rather out of focus!), we went to feed ourselves up at Pizza Hut, after which me and Sarah hopped in the car and headed back to TBWA as we were due to see Paul with some of our ideas for Nissan at 4pm. With an hour or so to spare, we went back over everything we rushed out yesterday (as we had to get our ads drawn up pronto once the photoshoot was arranged) and added a few more scamps to the mix before heading over to Parklands to see the man himself. We'd been a little worried that we were perhaps sacrificing vital time on the brief in favour of the photoshoot, but as I'm sure anyone could understand, we didn't want to pass up the opportunity to go along this morning. As it turned out, our worrying had been in vain as a nice amount of our work was well received. Having had something of a love/hate relationship with headlines ever since I decided to embark on the life of an aspiring copywriter, it was really good to hear that I'd done something right this time around as Paul really liked some of the lines. We came away with ideas to work on as well as a new fictional GHD brief which me and Sarah can't wait to get stuck into.

So overall it was a busy day for us, and a great one at that. Really enjoying the experience at TBWA so far, and dreading next Friday coming around too quickly (or at all!) but we're just going to get our heads down and bash out some stonking work and make the best impression we can whilst we're there!