Singapore, 29 March 2019: Noise GIF FEST opened yesterday to reveal over 150 newly created GIFs on giant LED screens, projections and new formats such as vertical screens. The five-day festival, which is supported by the National Arts Council’s Noise Anchor programs, is free to view and gives visitors access to a variety of exciting interactive works they can play with and experience for themselves.
On its inaugural day, the festival hosted an industry night with leading creative minds from Singapore and around the world who participated in a panel titled The Next Wave of Storytelling. The panel featured Singapore’s Tay Guan Hin, Founder of the TGH Collective, American sticker artist Marty Cooper, French motion graphics designer Yann Pineill and Eduardo Enrique Meza, Venezuelan-born Singapore-based creative director of Pinwheel, a social-first creative agency. They discussed how brands, media owners and artists are working together to tell new kinds of stories.
Steve Lawler, founder of The Unusual Network who are the creators of Gif Fest, said: “One of the reasons GIFs have become such a popular art form is because of the diversity of ideas and emotion they convey in a short snap of time. It’s exciting for us to bring together creative professionals who couldn’t be more different from each other to discuss how collaboration drives creativity.”
The industry night, supported by Facebook, also served as a launchpad for Uncommon Grounds a new digital project that pairs artists working in traditional media with artists from digital media to inspire the creative community.
Matthew Drury, Agency Development Lead, APAC at Facebook, said the idea was to showcase collaborative approaches to storytelling across the disciplines of visual art, literature and film. “We presented it as a mini-series to show the creative innovation that results when people connect and collaborate with someone they thought they had little or no common ground,” he said.
The series was conceptualised by creative agency, 72andSunny, following multi-market research where they spoke to more than 90 members of the creative industry across Asia Pacific, on behalf of Facebook. The study identified that while craft is of utmost importance to creative professionals, a majority feel that digital formats do not require the same level of craft as traditional formats.
“We had the idea to pair up these creatives working in different mediums to explore the change in modern advertising and to provide inspiration for digital canvases to be the destination for their next best work,” said Bassam Abdel-Rahman, Managing Director at 72andSunny Singapore.
The mini-series is available to view at https://www.facebook.com/business/m/uncommongrounds
