Luke Williamson and Yan Elliot:
Pushing Creative Boundaries at WCRS
Two of the advertising industry’s most creative practitioners, Luke Williamson and Yan Elliot, are using Apple technology to push the boundaries at London-based agency WCRS.
Luke Williamson and Yan Elliot are the joint creative directors at leading advertising agency, WCRS. They joined the London-based company in August 2005, having spent the previous eight years at Mother (the agency responsible for the Channel Five launch and ITV Digital’s Monkey, among others), and in Williamson’s own words, are seeking to “shake things up a bit”.
Elliot says: “We’re the public face of what WCRS stands for — basically, we’re the ads”. Those ads include everything from Mini, BMW and 3, to GlaxoSmithKline, Abbey and BUPA.
Part of the endeavour to “shake things up” focuses on the technology used in the WCRS creative department. “When we arrived, almost everything was done on PC”, explains Williamson. “I found that really strange for a creative department — ever since I arrived here, I’ve been trying to change the culture away from PCs”.
Williamson, like Elliot, works on a PowerBook with a 15-inch screen that is fully integrated into the WCRS setup. Sadaya Chalisey, the agency’s IT manager, explains: “All the art directors now have dual-processor Power Mac G5s with 1GB of RAM and 160GB hard drives. There are 11 in the department and they are all networked for file sharing, Web access, email and so on. They are also all integrated into the wider PC network”.
As far as software is concerned, Williamson says: “On a day-to-day basis, I use Photoshop and Illustrator. But I also make a lot of use of the software that comes as standard on the Mac — things like iSync, Address Book and iMovie”.
The latter is a good example of how Apple technology is changing the creative culture at WCRS. Williamson says: “Sometimes we do presentations where we find images and put them into Illustrator and Photoshop and then into iMovie. We’ve done voice narratives over the top and produced really funny little two-minute movies to show to clients to give them a better idea of what we’re aiming at. We try and sum things up, which we just couldn’t have done before. It’s brilliant that all that stuff is on the Mac as a standard package”.
Elliot adds: “It makes what we do so much more engaging. Instead of having polyboards of the work we’ve got to present, we can say: ‘Look at this little film’. Clients are really impressed by that. We’ve done some stuff together that we couldn’t have done if we didn’t have Macs”.
Williamson’s background is in graphic design, so he has seen first-hand how Apple technology can revolutionise an industry. Elliot, meanwhile, worked his way up in advertising — first at GGC, then at HHCL, and then at Mother where he and Williamson first teamed up.
He only recently started using Macs, but he’s already a convert. He says: “I’ve only just got into Macs really and it’s great. It’s just so well done that you want one. The whole experience of using it is fantastic”.
“We find images and put them into Illustrator and Photoshop and then into iMovie. We’ve done voice narratives over the top and produced really funny little two-minute movies to show to clients.”
While both Elliot and Williamson admire the technology, they are of the belief that the key to good work is good ideas. Elliot says: “People embracing technology to show their ideas — that’s what technology is good for. The trick about the technology is to use it in the best way possible to bring your ideas to life. The work needs to be good, though, that’s the most important thing. Embrace the technology when it’s relevant”.
Williamson is equally unequivocal: “The idea is king, and the idea wins. I’ve always believed that if you are a creative person then you can do whatever you put your mind to — filmmaking, designing, writing, fashion — whatever. If you put your mind to it and work hard, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to do all of those things”.
And that’s where the technology comes in. He says: “The interesting thing about computers is that they allow you to achieve whatever you can think of. The only restrictions we have are our own capabilities”.
