Should you leave work? Yes, says Alex Wadleton
By Alex Wadelton, originally published on http://www.campaignbrief.com/2016/09/alex-wadelton-why-you-should-l.html
In a lot of big agencies, there seems to be almost a competition to see who can stay the latest at work, who can work the most weekends, and who can be at their desk working earliest every morning. Some of it has to do with the fact that everyone is overworked, but a lot of it has to do with trying to give the appearance of being a hard worker.
Does it make the quality of work better? I’d say no.
Mostly it makes people resentful of the fact that they are just at work, stuck inside on a sunny weekend while all their non-advertising friends are out and about.
So, let me tell you a story about why you should leave the office as often as professionally possible.
A few years ago, I was wandering around an exhibition with my young son.
The details are a bit hazy- it might have been Scienceworks, it may have been ACMI… but there is was one thing that is crystal clear in my mind’s eye.
Hidden, almost Zoltar-like in a dark corner of this exhibition, were a couple of grotesque photographs of a mental asylum patient being tested upon in the 1860s by a French scientist with the incredible handle of Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne (de Boulogne).
What the bloody hell was he up to?
In short, he was applying electrodes to people’s faces to try and recreate the six basic human emotions of anger, happiness, fear, sadness, disgust, and surprise.
Some of them worked, others were bizarrely contorted, but all were impossible to look away from.
And it got me thinking. Why wasn’t there more study on this area? What was it all about? And how quickly could I shoo my son away from looking at a lunatic electrocuting people in the name of science?
I went home and read up about him, and it’s fair to say if he’d tried to do it now, he’d be locked up in an insane asylum himself.
Duchenne was intrigued to try and understand the physiology of the human face and how it works. From there it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump in logic to progress straight to feeding electrical currents into the facial muscles of lunatic asylum inmates just to see what happens.
Shits and giggles and all that.
But in the 19th century, there were no laws to protect against such barbaric pseudo-scientific study.
And that was that.
Just another useless piece of information to be stored in my brain never to be thought about again, swimming around with all the pointless sport stats I know, the encyclopaedic knowledge of drum n bass that hardly anyone else apart from me cares about (big ups to Etherwood!), and all of the horrendous dad jokes that cause nothing but groans from all and sundry.
Or so I thought.
Because last year whilst I was working at McCann Melbourne a brief for the Melbourne International Film Festival from Danish Chan lobbed on the desk of my then art director partner Andy Jones and me.
It was all about the emotions that you feel at the festival. How no matter what language you speak, we all share the same feelings.
They wanted a cinema ad, and a poster. Sure, we could do that, no problem!
Or we could go three and half million steps further and construct an archaic movie chair contraption that replicated what Duchenne was doing 150 years earlier by applying electrodes to people’s faces to stimulate their facial muscles in order to re-enact the emotions you felt whilst watching all the films that were playing at the 65th anniversary of MIFF.
No, really.
Getting a client to agree to this frankly insane idea was no small feat, for which Caroline Macmillan deserves an inordinate amount of praise.
Lauren Zoric at MIFF supported the idea from Day One, shepherding it through with élan.
Idea, somehow miraculously approved, we then had to figure out the small task it if was, you know, even possible.
That’s where Australia’s own SEO mad pseudo-scientist for the 21st century, Steven Nicholson from Airbag stepped in to frame. He and his team, supported by Robert Stock, Eliza D'Souza, and the inimitable Adrian Bosich were able to pull several hundred cats out of a bag along the way to make it happen.
Back at Rancho McCann Victoria Conners, Patrick Jennings, and Afrim Mehmed produced the bejesus out of the idea with the support of Adrian Mills and Pat Baron.
The best bit about working in this industry is getting to do crazy stuff that makes it sound like you are more interesting than you are when someone delivers your eulogy.
So, when at the Festival launch at Melbourne’s iconic Forum, the person tasked with being the test subject for The Emotion Simulator freaked out at the size of the 800-person strong crowd (and the fact that they were going to have electrodes placed all over their face, whatevs) there was only one idiot willing to step into the breach.
Being on stage as Steve manipulated my face for ten minutes is the most surreal experience of my life. Plus, I’m sure it was a bit of payback for Steve to inflict a modicum of pain on me for all the pain I’d caused him.
And it just goes to prove, once again, that it’s important to have a life outside of work. To be curious. To know a little bit about a lot of things. Because you never know what you’ll see in life that you can bring back to work.
So, go home on time. Don’t work on the weekend. Turn your computer off. Put that phone away. Wander about with your mind open.
You’ll not only enjoy your life more; you just might get to electrocute people for fun.
The Melbourne International Film Festival Emotional Trailer just secured 1 Gold, 2 Silver, and 5 Bronze at Spikes, to go with Gold, Silver, and Bronze at Cannes, a Grand Prix, two Gold, two Silver, and four Bronze at AdFest, a WARC Prize for Innovation, and an Effie. You can watch it here.
