The other day my tutor sent me this link to a blog of Ross Kemp folds. The project is damn near amazing and fits nicely into the category of a meme. More specifically, an intentional meme. Will it become a highly well known meme? Who knows but it's got my vote. Cheers Darren!


P.S. I've added the site to the meme list on the left of my blog. Enjoy.

I've been venturing more and more into Memes that reside outside of the internet realm and have started to find more of a link into in-jokes and professional careers. Ever heard of the 'Wilhelm Scream'? Although you may not know what it is, I am almost certain you've heard it at least once in your life. I myself have heard it on many numerous occasions and, as the sad git that I am, always make it my duty to make sure everyone in my vicinity knows that they have just witness the Wilhelm Scream. It's snuck it's way into many a film. Perhaps one of your favorites? Basically what started off as a small laugh in the odd movie is now a full blown in-joke amongst the sound engineer world. Brilliant how something like that can become almost bigger than the film it's in. Well, not all films. Take a look and see the some of the films the scream has appeared in.

Time to take a look at the idea of 'meme-ing' without the aid of the internet. To demonstrate this here are some examples of 'real life' Rick Rolling:

Here is an example of a company advertising a product by using the Rick Roll maneuver. Games corporation, EA, have been working on the game Dante's Inferno, based on Dante Alighieri's epic poem Divine Comedy. They sent a select few a box as a teaser for the games release. The content of this mystery box was indeed hell for the poor soul who opened it! In my eyes it's a brilliant way to draw fans in. The effort put in to this project shows people the commitment that EA has for it's (paying) audience.

And here is some unlucky sod who got Rick Rolled in the form of a Sing-a-gram. Sing-a-gram? I think that's the correct term. Anyway, this made me think into the mediums of meme-ing and what could be accomplished from these other forms.

And here's my view on what could be done with these ideas. Enjoy.

Well, I've been looking into this project deeper and deeper which has resulted with 2 outcomes:

1. Whatever the final piece/outcome of this project will be, it'll involve mainly the use of memes in the advertising world. For instance, ads that use meme cameos, virals, unintentional advertisement, 'banned' ads and how they can help products and businesses excel in sales and progress. I'll also be dabbling in creating memes and see if the responses are useful toward my research.
2. I now suffer from vertigo!
   

That's a lie... and a joke. Not a good one I might add but sod it, I can blag it as 'anti-humor'. So, as was previously stated, I shall be looking at the correlation between memes and advertising. So far so good. I have here a bunch of ads that are either influence by or in their own way, memes.

Gatorade - It's very subtly hidden within plain site, look at the bottle when the ballgirl sits down.

LOLcats- Seen here is a restaurant using the meme genre, LOLcats, to promote their deals.

Toyota - Bugger! This amusing ad is using the generic Aussie curse 'bugger' as a sort of meme to sell their vehicles. Basically if the Internet community loved this ad they would say 'bugger' more often and unknowingly give Toyota plenty of attention by spreading the ad to their friends etc. Chances are a fair few may have subconsciously bought a Toyota car or truck because of this.

Volkswagen - Same goes for this ad.

Wonder Boner - An ad that's so awful it's become famous. Anti-humour has made it popular and a meme in itself. Although I cant think of anyone who has bought this ludicrous device but I guess well over half a million people know of it now thanks to the Internet.

There's more but I don't want to fill this blog up with lists of links all the time. Get on YouTube and look for yourself.

More research coming up!

RIGHT! I've come across a slight snag in my project. And that snag is that I technically have no project. Basically, I'm buggered royally!

All is not lost though. The project is still doable but the main trouble is that I've lost my train of thought along the way and now can't think of a question to answer to some up my research. What is my research on? Memes of course but why? It's a subject I know well, it's very interesting to research and design wise it's brilliantly terrible. Again though, WHY am I doing a project on the meme?

It's really doing a number on my sodding head so if anyone out there could point me in the right direction that would be super!

I have some general ideas on what to do but I just don't know if they're good enough:

• Would advertising benefit from the Meme approach?
• Do memes need better designing to be appreciated more or is the bad design the key to a meme?
• If memes were mainstream conversation would they still be memes?
• Can the meme be seen as a new way to design?
• Why does the word meme seem really annoying if used more than once in a paragraph?

And so on and so forth. Please help me out here as I need to get back into gear on this as soon as possible because I have a limited attention span and will eventually do something else, like advanced pottery or publicly shouting at people to unite as a mob and slay the monster that is Amy Winehouse!

Quickly now I'm already hand making torches and ebaying pitchforks!

If you didn't see the MTV awards ceremony this year then you probably didn't witness Kanye West publicly embarrassing himself (again) during Taylor Swift's acceptance speech. It was so gloriously sodding awful and typical of Mr West that I wasn't so much surprised at this ludicrous outburst than I am normally about his general music career and ability to not be laughed out of any recording studio whatsoever! Anyway, this caused such widespread commotion amongst the millions of celebrity fanatics and chronic masterbaters that a new meme was born. In fact, Kanye himself is sometimes considered a meme. Well done Mr West, you've become a joke in both the industry and throughout cyberspace.

I was adding to my current (other) project and realised that it has relevance to this meme project... well, sort of. I'm currently doing a 'Robot a Day' which I draw a new robot and post it on a blog, everyday for a whole year. Not just for kicks of course. More of an illustration experiment to help broaden my abilities.