Hasta La Creative!

Seattle-based agency Super Frog Saves Tokyo is behind the above hilarious and endearing video of three grandmothers smoking cannabis for the first time, followed by Jenga using “all your hands,” discussions about ironing and attempts at opening a bag of chips. The agency created the video, which has now surpassed the 12 million view mark on YouTube, as a side project, but told The Wall Street Journal it plans to host a whole series of “entertaining yet thought-provoking videos” on the new site Cut.com beginning next week.

“Cut.com is an experiment for us,” Mike Gaston, SFST’s creative director, told that publication. “BuzzFeed is really good at getting content spread, and Vice is good at creating really thought-provoking content, but I think there’s space in between. I think it’s possible for us to create culturally relevant videos that are also entertaining…”

Gaston stressed that the video “isn’t simply a marketing tool for the agency,” despite all the publicity afforded to Super Frog Saves Tokyo as a result of its viral success. “This isn’t a business development tool,” he said. “Right now I’m only really looking for long-term, strategic partners for SFST.” He did add, however, that the agency “would happily turn Cut.com into its own business.”

One of the more interesting (and funny) facts to emerge from the Wall Street Journal interview was an unexpected challenge in creating the video. “Surprisingly, the hardest part of the entire video was finding grandmas that haven’t smoked weed,” Gaston said.

SFST initially attempted to use their own grandmothers, only to discover that they’d all tried cannabis at least once — as had all their friends. Next they turned to a talent agency, but even then only managed to find two candidates who fit the bill. Funnily enough, they resorted to using the talent agent’s own grandmother as the third party. According to The Wall Street Journal, Cut.com has already recorded more content, which will be uploaded to the site and its corresponding YouTube channel in the coming weeks. Let’s hope they can live up to their initial success.

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Los Angeles-based production company Gentleman Scholar teamed up with Motionpoems, “a non-profit that pairs up-and-coming poets with award-winning design, production and visual effects studios,” to create a visualization of Dora Malech’s poem “Working Order.”

Art directors Jordan Lyle and JP Rooney took the lead on the project, leading their team through the process, “from conceptualization to storyboarding to animation.” Lyle and Rooney were given complete creative freedom on the project and arrived at an intriguing visual interpretation of the poem.

“We wanted to do something that matched the personality of Gentleman Scholar, so we focused on making it risky and unique, while allowing it to remain accessible to a wide audience,” Rooney said. “Creating the imagery was really fun. It had to feel haunting, but not haunted.”

The project took several months to complete, as Lyle and Rooney painted each image by hand “before combining them with 2D and 3D techniques to create the stunning set of motion graphics featured in the video.” Stick around for full credits following the jump. continued…

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Former ad man Justin Cignac‘s attempts to improve the job market for creatives are now a bit more comprehensive.

The original purpose of the project Working Not Working was to empower agency-bound creatives to “free themselves from self-promotion” by going freelance and to help those who hire them “stop conducting exhaustive searches when qualified creatives are ready and waiting.”

Yet, after conducting an internal survey which found that “80% of the freelancers on the site would leave their beloved freelance lives for ‘the right’ full-time role”, Cignac and team created The UnJobBoard.

Not only are the gigs listed on UnJobBoard official–they’re only visible to the community’s own “vetted talent”. The team also worked to simplify them in order to avoid those lengthy, wallpaper-dry job descriptions that no one reads in the first place, helping employers to create custom posts quickly and manage them alongside lists of their favorite freelancers.

The gigs listed currently run from internships to one ECD position.

Screenshots after the jump.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.