The Swing of Things

Sunday June 19th, 2016

As the second day of the Festival began, and the excitement of new talks and things to see increased, so did the pure exhaustion. It gets quite hard staying up until 3 AM and waking up for the next day at 7 or 8 AM to simply do it all again. But then you weigh your options, and "when in France" rings through your mind.

Today, was the second and final day of the Health Lions part of the festival. This means that the talks and campaigns are all about the health industry within advertising. While I have not entirely decided what area of this industry I want to work in, every single Health talk interested me in different ways. For example, we sat in on a couple of guys discussing "Visual Healing", and the speaker was a cancer survivor. His cancer sparked so many new thoughts and ideas that jump started his business and ideas. And just hearing him share his story, and tell us what he went through to get to where he is today is inspiring. And that is what gives me extra excitement about this industry and my future.

When we needed a break from listening to speakers, we headed down to the beach cabanas in search of food and drinks (hoping they were free.) They were. The best part was the tent that we spent a good hour and a half in was Nokia. Their current product is called the Ozo, a 360 Virtual Reality camera. It puts you physically inside of TV shows, movies, places you are not currently in. Slight issue, it is 60 thousand dollars. But you know a girl can dream, maybe one day?

At the end of the day, we enjoyed the Rooftop Bar Networking Happy Hour. Visualize it like this: a large rooftop, with two or three long bars, and now add hundreds and hundreds of the most creative people on this planet standing a foot apart from each other. It was unreal. Kaitlyn and I weren't too sure how to just start a conversation with some people, which was fine because within minutes we were being called over "hello Americans!" by a group of creatives from Amsterdam, Netherlands. Many of them are here with their partner, ie: creative director and art director, and they work/are hired as a team. One of the teams is up for a Young Lions award, however their project prompt is given to them 24 hours before and they will create a Live mini film. They told us if we're good enough at acting we could potentially be in it, how cool would that be.

The one downside of the day was dinner. We went out into Cannes in search of food that wasn't a sandwich or finger food. And we found it, just not at the most American-welcoming place. The service was just plain bad, the food was mediocre, and the price was touristy high.

As we got on the train to head home, a classmate told us that the Gala had opened up to everyone to enjoy. After five minutes of back and forth consideration, "when in France" played over and over in our heads. So we got off the train, ran back to the Palais and danced our way into the night/early early morning with our new friends and connections.

I think we are finally getting the swing of things... slowly.

xo,
Shan