ICM - Leeds Design Agency

The Year was 1989 Ben Pawson was 9 years old.

At school we still got Arctic roll for dessert, which lets be honest was the best. We learnt that in Egypt, a 4,400-year-old mummy had been found in the Great Pyramid of Giza, I thought that my mum was old at 35.

Also at school I finally got picked for the football team, something I wanted to be apart of for ages. Only problem was I was very short at school and they put me in defence, didn’t seem to be my ideal role. My football shirt was a couple of sizes too big so I didn’t make an imposing figure like say…Terry Butcher.

Don’t worry i’ve not been hit in the face with a football, I had only just started to loose my milk teeth.

A lot of my time was spent in front of the TV, my excuse

In February Woof! Made its debut so straight after school I would be glued to that, and Fun House also premiered. Homework never stood a chance. On Weekend mornings I was up at the crack of dawn in my Thundercats pj’s, with a bowl of frosties on my lap ready to watch Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers.

One of the first films I saw at the cinema was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Harrison Ford and Sean Connery. After watching this I dug many holes in the garden looking for secret passage ways much to the despair of my parents, luckily it didn’t turn out to be my last crusade.

I did a lot of drawing usually of space battles as I loved Star Wars and perfected the Millennium Falcon.
The toy was my favourite Birthday present that year so I’d got something to compare with.

Whenever he had time off work my Dad would spend hours drawing with me so I think at that age I probably started to enjoy drawing and painting and realised that in the future I would like to do something artistic and had got over the ‘I want to be a fire man’ stage. One of the great artists of the centaury whether you loved or hated his work passed away on the 23rd of January, Salvador Dalí made a massive impact on the world of art and surrealist painting.

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While searching for a topic for a creative blog to add to our 9 day stint of birthday celebrations I came across an animated short appropriately named “9” by Shane Acker the award-winning director, animator and designer. This apparently is set to become a new feature length animation for release in September 09. The 11 minute short originally premiered at Sundance in 2005 and has won numerous awards.

Researching the subject on the wibbly wobbly way (www) I came across a technically more exciting animated venture, albeit a few years old now – Elephants Dream which is proclaimed as being the world’s first open movie, made entirely with free/open source software animation suite Blender under a Creative Commons license., thus allowing the movie to be remade, remixed and re-purposed with only a computer and the data on the DVD or download.

I wonder if Vint Cerf or Bob Kahn realised in the early days of the internet how it would eventually change our way of working and sharing. We have seen a whole raft of advances and innovations in what really is a very short space of time. Something you may expect to see in a lifetime now can easily happen over as little as 3-5 years, in some industries!

Who would think we would be hosting and sharing a large part of our working/social lives in the cloud (cloud computing), project management, accounts packages, office applications. They make life so much easier and accessible.

When I was nine years old in 1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen created Microsoft. The First of the new hobby computers were starting to appear including Altair 8800 and the battle for Video recorder standards of VHS and Betamax started. I was, however, more interested in The Wombles.

How things have changed so fast, yet some things remain the same – still no one gives a s**ff* about litter!...

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1996!

ICM celebrates its ninth birthday this week with balloons, cake and party hats all around the office! We are each taking a look back at the year that each of us where nine, what major events happened in these years and maybe a picture or two of some of us aged nine.

My Year is 1996

After the split of boy band Take That in February, girl groups were the next big thing. July 8th saw the Spice Girls release their first single ‘Wannabe’ which went on to spend seven weeks at number one in the UK singles chart. I am afraid to admit that I was a very big Spice Girls fan, my bedroom walls were covered with Spice Girls posters, I owned all of their albums and me and my friends used to pretend to be the Spice Girls in the school playground, singing their songs and trying to copy their routines! Oh the embarrassment!

Trainspotting directed by Danny Boyle was released. The film went on to become a cult classic and the films soundtrack producing the iconic hit Underworlds Born Slippy. Other films released in 1996 include Independence Day, Baz Luhrmann’s modern remake of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and the horror film Scream. My favourite film of the year was Roald Dahl’s Matilda

In the summer of 1996 England hosted Euro 96 in which our home team made it to the semi finals, only to lose on penalties to one of our biggest rivals. Euro 96 also lead to Baddiel and Skinners’ football anthem Three lions on a shirt. That summer was also America’s turn to host the Olympics in which Britain came away with 1 gold, 8 silver and 6 bronze medals.

Dolly the sheep became famous for becoming the first mammal to be successfully cloned from an adult cell.

To see some other major events of 1996 please click here...

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