Meet the Romanian Young Lions: The Heart Directors

Newsroom Creativity, Festivals & Awards, Innovation, People

The Heart Directors are the art directors that won the Design competition at The Alternative School for Creative Thinking. As such, they represented Romania in the Young Lions Design competition at Cannes Lions 2015. With the kind support of Publicis Bucharest, the team formed of Raluca Circo and Andrei Chirisi spent a week being inspired by the world’s greatest creatives and came back to tell the story. 

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  • What was your brief about?

Our competition consisted in building a new branding identity for the City of Cannes. Under the deadline pressure we had to apply all of the city’s attributes in a format that could be easily declined on multiple materials, while still maintaining the new branding guidelines.

  • How many other teams were there in the competition and how did the 24 hours pass?

There were 38 other teams in the competition and the 24 hours were an emotional rollercoaster.

 

  • How many creative routes did you come up with?

We settled on two distinct routes. The first was a synthetic view of Cannes, which combined a yachting wheel with a film reel in a metamorphosis. The second route was a geographical one, where the map of Cannes was used with its most defining buildings replaced by the city’s activities.

  • Which was the creative route you went for in the end?

We opted for the first route, in a minimalist approach that merged the two activities together. Yachting turned into a symbol of exploration and the cinematic reel defined the Cannes Film Festival as the most important cultural attribute of the city.

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  • Which were the most interesting seminars / topics you came across and why?

I now firmly believe that Cannes is a rite of passage that every creative should go through at some point. What is also true is that it’s hard to define the entire experience post-event. There are talks that seem to be outside of any particular route, held by people that also managed to shift the industry through time. Goodby & Silverstein were, in my case, the perfect example of that. I watched the seminar thinking how easily it seemed to turn a retrospective of their creative approaches in a transparent solution for the future. There are ideas that are timeless, and they stood to prove just how timeless they were. In other cases, I have to admit my regret attending some of the seminars with the immense fear of losing something greater.

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  • Which are the new ideas that have changed the way you think / how you believed the communication industry works?

The idea that technology is a mind-bending attribute in any campaign. While we usually think of the easy-to-implemented approach, there are those that stumble upon a new venture, usually a simple one that is so transparent it automatically reveals a solution to an insight. Also, take for example the 20 start-up companies that R/GA launched this year. Listening & nurturing a start-up idea that could be grown from scratch turned out to be so much more powerful when placed inside the walls of an agency that gave them a proper identity and developed their business strategy from the start. If there is a future to advertising, this is a version of it. Watching the colossal amount of work made me shift my mentality in regards to an agency’s capabilities. Welcome to “The internet of things”.

  • If you were to summarise the experience at The Alternative School from the beginning to Cannes in under 140 characters, how would it sound?

The Alternative School meant a constructive process in which each brief was meant to receive an ideal solution in less than a week, and usually after work hours. In retrospective, it’s not a school for the weak hearted. We applied a huge deal of effort that led us to projects we are extremely happy about.