2013 in Review with... Andy Fowler

Andy Fowler, ECD of London agency Brothers and Sisters, looks back over 2013 at what he and his agency has achieved, at the work that he most enjoyed watching and he looks forward to the coming year and what is wheting his creative appetite.

So here I sit on Friday December 20 thinking about the year past.

My young creatives are about five pints in at the Three Kings pub round the corner so I have some brief peace before I take them all out tonight and get them even more wrecked.

I offered them dinner, but they just want beer and tequila. Works for me.

2013 was a year of new beginnings for my Brothers and Sisters and I. We did our first work for PlayStation, some social videos for Gran Turismo 6.

We set off on a five-year relationship with the one and only David Beckham for Sky.

The kids are alright

And we launched two kids brands. We are proud partners in Matt Cooper’s visionary sustainable kids clothing brand The Fableists, with mega plans for 2014; check out our look-book.

And - hot off the press - we’ve just birthed our own interactive character world for kids aged three-to-four for the iPad called Inky and Smudge.

A flurry of end of year pitch wins sets up 2014 pretty darned nicely.

Promo perfection

In terms of inspirations, this is the year I feel in love with music videos again. 24 Hours of Happy is the thing I’ve gone back to the most this year. Time and time again in fact. It’s such a simple idea, but every moment is brilliantly entertaining and full of soul.

It's a music video that lasts a whole day, where regular folk dance joyously one after another to the most uplifting release of the year, Pharrell’s Happy from the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack (I took my kids to see it twice). Big up directors We are from LA and Pharrell’s creative director Woodkid for an awesome job.

Sometime music videos blow me away in a way ads rarely do. Jon Hopkins Open Eye Signal directed by Aoife McArdle with cinematography from Steve Annis is one such. I’ve watched it about 20 times. It’s a great track first of all; an intense, shimmering slab of softly gliding techno.

The film follows the journey of an enigmatic, bruised young skater as he hits the open road alone. Where he’s headed no-one knows. To escape or just for the sake of the ride. It’s just too beautiful.

Africa Express

Memory of the year was undoubtedly my trip to Mali with Africa Express. Lu, our art buyer, and I were privileged to be invited to Bamako with an exclusive group of musicians and producers such as Damon Albarn, Brian Eno, Ghostpoet, Django Django, Hot Chip and Ghostpoet.

They spent a week in a walled garden called Maison de Jeunes writing and recording an album with incredible local musical talent and you can buy it here.

We also visited an impoverished rural community near Bamako, that Brothers and Sisters have been supporting now for some years, building school classrooms and such like.

Here’s a little Guardian film that gives you a flavour of the trip.

The year ahead

In 2014, I’m most excited by new movies from Spike Jonze and Jonathan Glazer.

Spike’s zeitgeisty She, captures Joaquin Phoenix’s love affair with his operating system, while Glazer’s Under the Skin is an almost dialogue-less, enigmatic and brutal killing spree from Scarlett Johansens’ alien.