We Are Flow

While I respect the work put into this piece I don't think it should be glorified by a feature on this (or any) site. Glorifying work like this only serves to encourage others to take others' ideas, slap a coat of paint on them and call them their own.

Recently Motionographer removed an article about "everydays" when it became clear that the author had just been lifting ideas from other artists without crediting them, and while it may seem harsh I think it was the right thing to do. Granted their whole mission statement is to highlight innovative work, whereas this site is mostly just highlighting its products, so there's an obvious difference there.

Ultimately though, I feel like you can't just piggyback your way to being a good designer, you have to earn it. We're all earning it all the time, and yes, it's really f*cking hard. Sometimes you just have to suck it up and do the work.

And I mean.. this is supposed to be a spot for CREATIVE agency, is it not?

Wow... What we do is come up with great ideas.... Ummm no. You can't say your company comes up with great ideas and then take someone else's script and say well... It's really good and we have no idea how to make it our own...

Dear aescripts and motion design community.

I just wanted to give you our view on the above We Are Flow video.

As a new company just starting out and finding our voice and style we are constantly looking at the work of our heroes in the industry for inspiration, companies like Buck, Giant Ant, Studio AKA and Royale, amongst others. It's these guys that inspire us and motivate us every day to make better work, and we try to emulate their incredible style and success.

We're HUGE fans of Royale, they're a constant source of inspiration and are the kind of company we aspire to be.

We're brand new, literally a few months old, and we decided to have a bit of launch party to introduce ourselves to the neighbours, and for the occasion we wanted to make a video that introduced us, and told people who we are and what we do. Then we saw the amazing Manifesto video by Royale and just loved it, it was perfect, we must have watched it a thousand times. We took inspiration from it massively, and wanted to make our own version of this great video.

The intention at first was just to show it at the launch party, it wasn't going to go online, it wasn't client work, just a project we did in our down time for this event.

We didn't want to rip off the Royale video, we borrowed the concept but tried to remake all the visuals in our own style.

We tried to adapt and re-write the copy to fit us, but Royale just got it so perfect it was hard to think up a better way to say some of it, they'd nailed it, and we were diluting or skewing the message by changing it, so we changed it as much as we could but left some bits as they worked perfectly for us too, lines like - 'We're a Design Company, A Creative Production Company'. We are! That seemed ok as it described us too.

We did change the visuals significantly in our version, and everyone we showed the video to thought it was different enough that it wasn't a 'swipe', more a 'remix' and a homage to their great work, so we thought why not upload it and share it a bit.

BUT, we should have got in touch with Royale straight away to show them, and credited them with the concept in the description on Vimeo, and on our site. This was a huge oversight, and bad etiquette, and I have since added the credits to Vimeo and our site, and got in touch with Royale about it. And if they are uncomfortable with it and want it taken down or changed, it's done, no question about it.

We're not in any way trying to claim ownership of their work, and if you look at the two together, theirs is a master-piece, ours is merely a tribute to a master-piece.

That's all, just wanted to give you our point of view.

Thanks for your time.


Karl Doran

Flow Creative