We Can Work It Out: Creative industries in collaboration

 1 Use Hearing Protection 

 

 

 

This poster from 1978 advertising gigs at Manchester's Russell Club is an example of the music industry, Factory Communications Ltd collaborating with the graphic design industry, Peter Saville to promote a series of live music events. The two industries worked together by Factory arranging the gigs (they would go on to sign some of the bands to their Factory Records label) and commissioning the poster to promote them from Saville who then went on to become a partner in the company and create Factory's visual design programme which included the iconic front cover to the 1979 album Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division which has subsequently appeared on everything from t-shirts to tea towels and Dr Martin's boots. According to Matthew Robertson, author of Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album, Saville drew on a number of diverse sources for the poster including 'the typographic charatceristics of Jan Tschichold's Die Neue Typographie (1928), the colour scheme of the UK's National Car Parks and, and a warning sign from Saville's college workshop.' The effect is strikingly modern and eyecatchingly unusual for a gig poster, especially for the era, and might well have influencde a music fan to attend the gigs, even if they hadn't heard of the bands, demonstrating one of the more obvious benefits of creative collaboration. 

 2 Vogue magazine cover

This magazine cover is a collaboration between the publishing industry, Conde Nast Publications Ltd (who own own Vogue UK, of which this is the May 2021 cover), the fashion industry (the clothes featured on the cover are by Italian fashion house Fendi Couture) and the film industry (the cover star is actor Thandiwe Newton). The magazine commissioned fashion photogrpaher Mikael Jansson to do the photographic shoot and would have arranged for various fashion houses to loan clothes for the various set ups in the accompanying magazine feature which include items from Dolce and Gabbana, Isabel Marant and others. Although the intervoiew is a profile of Thandiwe, its purpose it to promote the actors forthcoming films that include Reminiscene and All The Old Knives. The collaboration therefore serves as a vehicle to promote product from the film industry, fashion industry and the publishing industry (collabortating with the designers and the actor helps the magazine project its brand image of  glamour and aspirational lifestyles). 

The Last of Us TV series 

 

The Last of Us is a forthcoming TV series based on the adventure video of the same name and is a collaboration between Sony Pictures Television (television production company) , PlayStation Productions (film and TV production compnay) Naughty Dog game development studio, The Mighty Mint TV production company, and Word Games (Entertainment services compnay delivering the creation, development, writing, directing, production and post-production of films and TV). Naughty Dog who originally published the game are providing the source material including story and look and feel and the other collaborators are proivding the means of production to bring the story to the small screen. The series is being co-writtien by Naughty Dog co-president Neil Druckman who was the creative director of The Last of Us games and screen writer and film director Craig Mazin which brings the two disciplines of games and TV creation and production even closer together. One of the benefits of the collabortation is that the series will have a ready audience in the many millions who have bought and played the game, and the TV exposure may well create new demand for the game from fans of dystopian sci-fi TV shows.