LongXi Creative Forum/Exhibition

Yesterday was a tiring day, it was the LongXi Creative Forum/Exhibition 龙玺大家斗“酷”, held in Sunway Pyramid Convention Centre. The forum started at 9a.m. and ended around 6p.m. Everyone from the multimedia department went and so did I.

The forum used ancient Chinese torture methods as a theme. Showing that Chinese creativity existed back in ancient times, apart from the 4 famous Chinese inventions, the various forms of ancient torture methods were seen as creative as well. The website is beautiful, done by TOA’s Multimedia Team. Ooo.. nice!!! click here to see the site.

The forum was very unique not only because of the theme behind it, but the speakers, I find they are very extraordinary and very well planned compared to the Kancil Awards I went last time. There were 2 sessions, the first was conducted in English while the second was in Mandarin. The mandarin session gave me the feeling of returning back to High School, where lectures and speakers were all speaking Mandarin. It just felt very different and comfortable, after 3 years of experiencing the absence of Mandarin in my college years.

Hehe.. I got my pass which wrote Professional. Ooo.. sounds cool isn’t it. Well, There were many speakers for the day: 3 out of the 4 dinosaurs – Jimmy Lam, Thomaz Mok, Peter Soh and more. The list is here.

Among all of the speakers, the one that captured my most attentio nwas Thomaz Mok’s philosophy of Creative “Yi Jing 易经” based on the oldest Chinese classic text formerly known in Wade-Giles as “I-Ching”. Literally it means Classic of Changes. But, Thomaz’s Yi Jing was very different. Here in the chinese character of “意”, he implemented 11 other “yi” s and to form. It was so extraordinary, it caught my eye just when he showed this slide:

It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, apart from the colours used. The 11 characters used here represents his philosophy of creative advertisements. We all know that creative in mandarin is called “Chuang Yi 创意”, he explained every aspect of his “yi”s from 创易 simplicity, 创异 difference, 创一 originality, 创宜 appropriate, 创忆 memorable, 创艺 craft, 创依 relevance, 创怡 delightful, 创议 talkabout, 创移 expandable, and lastly to 创益 effective. These are the important aspects and elements of a creative advertisement. Here are some examples he showed:

A FedEx Ad to show heavy duty

A medicine for running nose ad

Miller Beer ad, very nice execution of a basketball

Quote from Thomaz “I believe in creativity than vanity, exploration than definition”. It was a meaningful speech from him. Oh oh! See… here is prove that I listened to the talk ok? I took notes here and there. *hehe. Bad handwriting after 3 years of not taking Chinese notes. Hmm… gotta improve on that.

The talk was a also a good place to get fat. We actually had 2 tea breaks and 1 big lunch. Cheesecakes, mini burgers, chocolate cakes, tea and more. After all those food, again we had to sit in our places and listen to the speakers. Lunch was pretty good. Yenny’s herbal chicken soup was taken away by the waitress and she was furious. *chuckles There were 2 drumsticks in her soup and she haven’t even tasted it. Hahaha… she was like “Aaargh!! Where’s My Soup??”

The talk was very educational indeed. The 2nd round of panel judges were very interesting. Their critiques were fabulous, as they touched on every possible angle to talk about the pros and cons of the advertisements shown. From Hongkies, to Taiwanese, to Mainland Chinese and even Malaysian Chinese. Here is a really nice ad I like. It is a traditional Chinese character of “horse 马” spelled into English as HORSE. The product is a translation pen. Very beautiful calligraphy.

~ by reubenteo on 7 December 2007.