We’ve made two new films with BERG as part of an ongoing series of collaborations bringing to life the ideas behind our strategy Making Future Magic.

Both video sketches use the growing number and variety of media surfaces as a canvas: “Incidental Media” explores a number of different illustrations across various brands and companies, and “The Journey” focuses on some of the opportunities around travel in stations and on trains.

After playing with the philosophy in a more abstract way with our first film back in September, we wanted to look at some examples across our clients and other brands.  The same fundamental preoccupation has driven all three films though – what magical alternatives (however gentle or small) to the prevailing Minority Report version of the future of communications might be.

Making Future Magic was partly conceived as a way to avoid making horrible use of media that makes everyone feel like Chief John Anderton.  But also (and mostly) as something that would help us think about the most exciting creative  possibilities opening up in a continually shifting and multiplying media landscape, where the scope of communications broadens to encompass and meld service, product and software with more traditional advertising.

We used some principles in the brief to act as constraints to help our thinking.  These come from a belief that the growing ubiquity of media surfaces is something that could be dreadful, but could also be brilliant – and perhaps magical.  They were that communications should:

Allow for agency – the ability to control and affect your own and your shared environment in the face of communications.  Magic, play and information is a choice, never an infliction.
Be polite – earning or winning attention (as opposed to interruptive media).
Be sensible to their environment and human context – i.e. the antithesis of spam.
Contribute culturally – considering and enhancing their context, seeking to be creative and magical (not merely efficient, efficacious, expedient).

Jack Schulze and Matt Jones talk about their thinking on “Incidental Media” here and “The Journey” here over on BERG’s blog.

Thanks to Timo Arnall, Matt Brown, Matt Jones, Jack Schulze, Canon, East Coast Trains, the Guardian and Uniqlo.