Have you guys heard of this event, Pecha Kucha? It’s kind of an informal artist lecture night, hosted in cities all around the world. It draws a shockingly large crowd from all walks of the “creative” landscape, and offers them a series of presentations from a pretty wide range of fields. This last Wednesday’s gathering at Mantra collected architects, visual artists, scientific visualizers, and… well, people like us. But not just “us” – people like Phil Stockton.

Phil and I were up to make the same sort of presentation that everyone else did. 20 slides, shown for 20 seconds each. And so I yammered on for a couple minutes about our creative process, brainstorming, and so on and on. But Phil, man. That guy took things to another level. He cruised along with the audience on a guided tour of the CNN T-Shirt campaign and I swear, he might as well have been doing it from the audience’s collective living room while massaging their feet and soothing all their pets and children. It was so comfy. He walked through where the idea came from, where it went, and tied it all up in a nice little bow that did nothing short of planting the image in each audience member’s head that detailed just how damn fine they’d look in a new shirt from CNN.

Just look at this bastard.

Here’s Phil in a photo taken by Jason over at Common-Content.com, where we see him in the midst of some sort of transcendental trance, most likely channeling a distillation of the entire creative process. Straight to the brain. And the audience is totally enthralled. The guy to the right? He’s looking for a halo. The girl on the left? Looking for her future. It was an amazing thing to behold on such an impressive night.