Fullrange
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Big Picture
Prologue
Our client was Audiences Central – the audience development and arts marketing agency for the West Midlands. Audiences Central’s remit is to help arts and cultural organisations build and sustain audiences for their work, and also to reach out to new audiences for the arts. The brief was to create a film telling the story and illustrating the success of Audiences Central’s Big Picture project, which aimed to engage non-arts attendees in the visual arts using photography. The West Midlands public were called upon to take and submit photos to the project to be used to create a record-breaking piece of public art – the world’s biggest photo mosaic consisting of 112,896 individual photos.
The film was hosted on the Big Picture project website and distributed to stakeholders as part of its project legacy work. The Arts Council, who funded the project, used it for their promotional work and as an evaluation tool.
The story
We believe that defining our clients’ messages in story form is the most engaging way to communicate them. Here we already had a clear overarching story to tell: how the Big Picture came together! But there were a lot of elements and individuals’ stories to tie together in order to tell the story well.
Working closely with our client to decide the best way to tell the story, we chose several elements to weave into the narrative including interviews with contributors who had submitted photos, Audiences Central staff, creative partners including the lead artist and online photo editor, and sponsors of the project. We also included footage of the actual photo sticking and mosaic construction at every stage of progress, shortlisted photo images and incorporated footage of news coverage provided by BBC Midlands Today. We used an overarching climatic story structure to keep the audience engaged throughout, and anchored this around the ‘reveal’ moment of the Big Picture itself and employed rising pace and interspersed graphics to track the progress of the project and build up to the ‘reveal’.
We knew the contributor interviews would be key to showcasing the story of The Big Picture’s successful engagement of many different types of people. It was important to us that these interviews highlighted personalised stories of how the project positively affected and grew their engagement with the arts. We also knew that the human story element to the project – that of whose picture would be chosen, was a really great angle to get people engaged with the story.
Behind the scenes...
We worked closely with the client to develop key interview questions, and to put the contributors at ease to talk to us openly about what their own experience of The Big Picture meant to them and how it may have helped develop their perspectives on photography. We wanted to grab people’s attention, set the pace, and highlight what was at stake with the challenge from the very beginning – so we opened the film with a montage of the news coverage interspersed with graphics relaying key details of the premise of the project.
We continued to build up anticipation with the story of the challenge of sourcing enough photos, using a motion graphic on screen at various points showing the growing photo count. Shots of early progress such as sticking photos on boards and constructing the scaffolding, were cut together with the shortlisted contributors’ interviews early on in the film to introduce them and their photos – building the human story aspect of which photo would be chosen as the final mosaic image.
Client Feedback
Abigail Corfan, Audience Development Officer - Audiences Central
The Big Picture was a groundbreaking audience development project funded by Arts Council England West Midlands, and led by Audiences Central. As part of the project the people of the West Midlands broke the record for the world's largest photo mosaic, which was constructed outside Millennium Point in Birmingham. As this was an historic event we wanted to record the achievement by creating a short documentary film, to use on our website for the general public to view and as resource for presentations to stakeholders.
As usual with arts projects the budget was very tight and the timescale short, but the Fullrange team were able to produce a film that clearly explained the story of the Big Picture project and that incorporated some fantastic footage of the mosaic. I was particularly pleased with the attention to detail and imaginative use of our brand, and I hope to work with Fullrange on future projects because of their creative, warm and innovative approach.