On Brief: Kate Bones teams up with Creative England for ‘Be More Boss’ campaign
Our On Brief project pairs emerging creative talent with startups to produce scroll-stopping visuals for Facebook and Instagram. Here we take a look at GIF artist Kate Bones’ collaboration with Creative England for a campaign aimed at female entrepreneurs
GIF artist Kate Bones is known for creating striking animated portraits. She has combined analogue and digital technology to shoot drag performers at Glastonbury and created stereoscopic GIFs for Missguided, Nike and House of Holland. For our On Brief project she developed a new technique, using 3D scanning to create 360-degree portraits of four female entrepreneurs supported by Creative England.
Bones created images of Bec Evans, Co-founder of Prolifiko, a productivity app for writers; Olly Paulovich, CMO of Snaptivity, a company that uses technology to drive fan engagement at sporting events; Sally Higham, CEO and Founder of RunAClub, a low-cost digital platform that allows people to run clubs and community networks, and Louise Pasterfield, MD of Sponge UK, an award-winning business that delivers e-learning through new technologies such as VR and AR.
The portraits form part of Creative England’s ‘Be More Boss’ campaign, which aims to encourage more women in the creative industries to start their own business. Creative England invests in digital, tech, games, film and TV companies but just 16% of the applications it receives from digital and tech companies are from female-led organisations.
“We don’t receive anywhere near as many applications from women as we’d like to … so we are proactively trying to encourage more women to ‘Be More Boss’ by showing some of the most inspiring female leaders we work with already,” says Rachel Johnson, Marketing Manager at Creative England.
Creative England set creatives a brief to come up with an idea for a set of visual assets that would capture the attention of female entrepreneurs on Facebook and Instagram and encourage them to visit its website to find out more about the support and services it can offer.
Bones pitched the idea of creating 360-degree portraits of female entrepreneurs and suggested using a 3D object in each portrait to represent the subject’s business.
“We wanted eye-catching, moving imagery that would help us to tell a story,” explains Johnson. “[Kate Bones’ idea] really stood out as an opportunity to create distinctive social content which would bring some of the most inspiring female-led businesses we have worked with to the forefront.”
The project allowed Bones to experiment with a new technique (3D scanning) and new software (Cinema 4D). “It was really important for me to make something different from the 3D stereoscopic GIFs I’m known for,” she says. “My work is based in portraiture and presenting this in new forms … and for this project, I wanted to try out a new technique I’d been experimenting with.”
Creative England was happy for her to try something different: “We loved that [she] was using the project as an opportunity to create something new. Kate Bones’s projects have already taken Instagram by storm and we wanted to support her to experiment and try new things, as we do with all of our supported talent,” adds Johnson.
Portraits were shot in a studio at Facebook HQ and Bones worked with a 3D designer to animate 3D scans. She also worked with a modeller to create the 3D objects for each portrait. She then used Cinema 4D to combine portraits and objects in a single moving image.
“We had to set up the shoot like we would for a film. I then used a 3D scanning technique [to capture each entrepreneur’s image]. They had to sit very still for their portrait for a few minutes and we did several different takes. It’s a relatively quick process and I think that’s what I like about this technique – if it was too long a process, you could easily lose the connection [with a subject],” she explains.
“It was important to keep the final portraits simple and fun yet visually striking,” adds Bones. “The tricky bit was trying to balance the final image. I needed to incorporate the tools that represent each entrepreneur’s business in a way that was fun without distracting from their image. For example, laptops can be a bit bland as an object, so it was important to make it fun, so I decided to make them bright and very colourful.”
Bones’ portraits will feature in sponsored posts, sponsored Stories and organic posts on Creative England’s Feed. Creative England also plans to post behind-the-scenes content from the shoot and interviews with each entrepreneur.
“From this week, we will launch the campaign across Instagram to a wide audience … to really drive home the message that we are crying out for female-led business to invest in,” says Johnson. “The campaign will run for two months as a full digital marketing campaign, with Instagram as the hero platform.”
The entrepreneurs featured represent a wide range of innovative businesses. “These enterprises range from big to small and cover the length of the country. We want to encourage female creatives from all industries and backgrounds to consider branching out [so] having a strong and diverse group of example cases really helps to make that case,” explains Johnson.
Bones says the final images are close to what she had imagined: “[The images] do adhere to the original pitch but they are portraits, artworks in a way, and I think that’s really cool. Sometimes when you do commercial work, there’s a tendency to have to tone down what you’re doing and that’s definitely not happened here – we have a portrait of someone spinning around with foam fingers bouncing around her! – so I’ve definitely been allowed to keep the colour and fun in what I do,” she adds.
She is now hoping to use some of the techniques she has learned to create digital portraits and physical objects for a solo exhibition opening in Spring 2018. Johnson says Creative England is keen to collaborate with more creatives in the future and put original content “at the heart” of its social media strategy.
Creatives are paid for their involvement in On Brief and are not asked to produce speculative work – only a rough outline of their ideas – at pitch stage.
On Brief is part of Inspire, a year-long partnership between Creative Review, Facebook and Instagram to showcase outstanding creative work across both platforms. Facebook and Instagram’s Creative Hub was launched this year to help the creative communities understand mobile marketing. The online tool allows creatives to experiment with content formats – from Instagram video to Facebook Canvas – and produce mock-ups to share with clients and stakeholders. It also showcases successful campaigns created for mobile. Try out the mock up tool at facebook.com/ads/creativehub and see the inspiration gallery at facebook.com/ads/creativehub/gallery.
See more of Kate Bones’ work at katebones.com or follow her on Instagram (@katebones). Find out more about Creative England’s work at creativeengland.co.uk