MTV & Body Shop Site: Move Your Lips

!WARNING! (Extremely) Bright colours below!

Yep that's right, it's another MTV/Staying-Alive Project, this time in conjunction with The Body Shop, and it's called Move Your Lips.com.

The Body Shop have produced a special edition Guarana lip butter which will be sold in stores worldwide. An amount from every sale will go directly to the Staying Alive Foundation, the MTV charity which gives monetary awards to young people, globally, who run their own youth focussed HIV and AIDS awareness projects. Move Your Lips is also all about encouraging young people to speak out, whether it's on the subject of HIV and AIDS, or anything else that's affecting them. The TV Promo (with the site url) is apparently going out on all MTV channels all over the planet. Which is quite a few! The url is also to be found on the posters adorning all Body Shop stores, such as this one I found in London at the weekend (Please note - I did not design the poster).


It's the 3rd project I've designed now for MTV directly, and the second for the Staying Alive Foundation. In this case the starting point was some print advertising in a bold pop-art style that had already been produced (see posters above), and the client also wanted the site to be presented as a town. And so it was that the giant lips became a pair of hills, and the town was built in front of them - hey presto!

Once again, I couldn't have done this without David Terranova, who is the man who brought it all to life in Flash, made all the content editable via XML, and set up the 10 languages required. I especially love the page transitions he created.

The whole project all ran incredibly smoothly, in both the design and build phases, and was delivered on time and to budget.

There's a lot of content to check out, including a simple game that can become quite addictive as you try and beat the high score. So, please enjoy, and of course support the campaign!

Home:


Campaign:


Buy Now:


How You Help:


Videos:


Lip Love Wall:


Protest:


Downloads:


Send a Kiss:


Game Screen:


Game Screen:


Wallpaper Examples:

Blinkbox Pitch

At the end of last year I was invited to pitch a design for BlinkBox, a site that allows users to customise a video clip from a large Hollywood library with a message, and to buy and rent movies.

Although in the end my pitch was unsuccessful, they were extremely pleased with the work I submitted, and apparently it was a very close run thing in the end, with some long debates over where they wanted to take things, as much as over the designs themselves. It was a good experience though, and a paid pitch, so in the end no-one lost out.

At their request I've just removed the logo I designed, but otherwise these are shown with kind permission...

Epica award for PS3 This Is Living

Not sure when this happened exactly (!), but apparently the Sony PS3 site I was involved with last year won a Silver Epica Award (Europe's Premier Creative Awards) in the Interactive section. Which is of course very nice to hear, and again I was glad to be part of it.

Cadbury Pitch Win

In December of last year and January of this, I was working with CMW Interactive on a pitch for the main Cadbury website, providing art direction, design and illustration. I'm pleased to say that they won the contract, and I was glad to be involved. It might be some time before I can show what I produced, but for now this tasty morsel of news will have to do!

LinkedIn...er...Link

In actual fact I've been on LinkedIn for quite some time now, but if you'd like to hook up you can find me at www.linkedin.com/in/samgilbey. I thank you.

Blackflood Contribution

A couple of years ago I was invited to contribute an illustration to the Blackflood project, a book which unsurprisingly was to be filled with purely black and white artwork. Other participants included Drew Europeo, Catalina Estrada, Stuntkid, Inksurge and Hellohikimori.

To this day I've yet to get my hands on a copy (and it appears to still only be available in the Philippines), but Jeff Mendoza, a new friend I've made on the wonderful Behance Network and fellow participant, has kindly taken some snaps for me:





The portrait, in case you were wondering, is of the One Huge Eye Meister himself, Mr. Alex Amelines. Although as I have now officially revealed, his eyes are both of a normal size...

One That Got Away...

At any one time I like to have a variety of projects on the go, both personal and collaborative. Naturally for various reasons they don't all see the light of day, and the artwork shown below is from one such collaboration. I'm not going to go into any further details, but suffice to say that it was brought to a close on good terms.

Most importantly, I'm pleased with the artwork that was produced, even though it should really just be considered as work in progress...

Discovery Home and Health Channel Illustrations

Early last year I was working again with Nowwashyourhands (now Playgroup) on a project for the Discovery Home and Health Channel. They wanted a room designer website, where users could create a mock-up of a room they wanted to decorate, and then try styling it in different ways with flooring, furniture, and so on. An isometric forced perspective route was chosen, and I was brought in to illustrate various items of furniture for the project. As you can see, it has little in common with my usual illustration style, but I enjoyed the challenge, not despite of, but for the meticulousness it demanded. I suppose the best analogy is that It was kind of like creating pixel art in HD!

Beneath a selection of some of the illustrations I created, you can see a couple of screengrabs of the application at work. But you'll also find it online here. Once the illustrations were finished, I got busy on tons of other stuff afterwards, and I believe the actual launch was some time later anyway, hence the late blogging of this. It's not actually because I've been having counseling about the phobia I developed of chesterfield sofas since then, honest!

Television Project in the Pipeline

Since the beginning of the year I've been producing illustrations at a pretty frenetic rate for an exciting project that I've been working on for Tiger Aspect Productions. Unfortunately that's literally all I can say about it right now, other than it's been (intense) fun. News to follow as and when...

Illustration for Pearson Education Canada

Pearson Education Canada came across a really (really) old piece I did for Netdiver's Independents Day Project way back in 2004, and commissioned me to create a new version. It's going to appear in a Grade 7 textbook (ages 11-12) entitled 'Literacy in Action: Speak Out'.

The piece touches on several themes, such as the notion of worthwhile causes being adopted as fashion symbols, and deals with the irony that I'm able to create a piece that stands up for these issues in the first place. It's strange redoing something that one would perhaps tackle slightly differently today, but I'm pleased with how this turned out all the same...