Takeshi Takada
"When I got to Australia, I couldn't even speak English. So I had to start off at a school for immigrants, who also couldn’t speak English. It was full of people from all over the world and was a real melting pot. The truth is, I didn’t learn much English there, but I did learn a lot about the world."
"After this, my father then sent me to Brisbane Grammar School, which was probably the best thing he could have done for me. It was a very competitive sporting and academic private school, and I found the other boys knew exactly what they wanted to do for a career. It was the usual sort of job with schools like this: lawyer, doctor or accountant. Unfortunately for me I still had no idea as to what I wanted to do."
"I thought maybe I should be an international landscape architect like my father, so I started studying psychics and maths in my final years at Grammar. But I really didn’t enjoy these types of subjects at all, so I decided to change my program to arts and found that I was really quite good. In fact, I won a number of awards at school."
"My maternal grandfather was an architect who later became a painter. And, my paternal grandfather also loved to paint as well, so I guess you could say there has always been an inner artist with me."
"However, it sadly wasn't art that that I choose to do after leaving Brisbane Grammar. At the time, Australia was going through a big tourism boom, so I thought maybe I could go and study business focusing on tourism. I was also helping out a guy who was running rugby tours to Australia, so I thought of doing both tourism and sports management as majors to my business degree at university."
"After completing my degree, Australia's tourism boom had burst, but Japan was now going through its own IT boom. They didn't really care what your major was, so long as you had a business degree. It was also really rare in Japan, to have bi-lingual people in an IT company, so I got a job almost immediately."
"During the three years I worked for this IT company, I got to work with the advertising agency Denstu on a couple of projects. I was now exposed to the world of ad agencies and that really inspired me to move into the advertising industry. I managed to work for Publicis Worldwide, Euro RSG and BBDO Tokyo while I lived in Japan. I worked on everything from Emirates Airlines, SanDisk and Air New Zealand."
"When I came to work at BBDO, I was working in a group that handled all of the global pitches. I was really enjoying working with all of the other global BBDO offices, until I went back to Australia on holidays. That's when I happened to meet one of the owners of Cutting Edge, Ray Smith. I had no thoughts of getting into post at all, but Ray convinced me to return to live in Australia and work for him. Ray has worked so hard and achieved so much, that he really inspired me. He was only forty at this stage and had this post and outside broadcast company and I thought that this was great opportunity to have a mentor too."
"So after being away from Australia for eight years, I returned to go and work at Cutting Edge. While I was there, I just loved winning all of these international business pitches and getting to work on all of these really creative and interesting TV commercials. Even today I just live to do this sort of work. Not everyone can hope to dream of doing that, let alone having that as a job, like I do."
"While I was at Cutting Edge, I worked with Collin Renshaw and we won some great pitches, like Coke Zero’s ‘Wild Health’ TVC featuring Japan's mega-pop star Namie Amuro. Then there was the CG TV commercial for Platinum Games’ 'Vanquish', which Colin directed. This was a full CG gaming robot type of spot, with firing guns and flame; the sort of thing that our animators just loved us to bring back from Japan."
"To finish a project like this, with all of these passionate artists makes the incredible hard hours worth it. It's just an unbelievable feeling I get when everyone ticks off on the final, and you know you have been part of this amazing crafting process. I have always loved the story telling opportunity you can create with TVCs like these."
"This was something that Colin Renshaw and I really wanted to do a lot more of. But you really don’t have the opportunity to do this sort of work to its full potential, unless you have total control. So we established our own VFX and post house called Alt.vfx, so that we could do the sort of work that we love the most and to do it the way we wanted to."
"The new team I have around us now is so tight and it’s a joy to work on really complex projects. That’s pretty much why I left Cutting Edge, so that I could create my own company and develop my own creativity even further."
"As our reputation for doing award winning stuff has got out there, we have got busier and busier. Which is great thing for so many reason. One of them is that I am getting more and more opportunities to drive more creative led projects. Which is a dream come true for me!"