CAMPAIGN LIVE: In last week’s D&AD virtual ceremony, the organisation awarded three black Pencils, its highest accolade. While diverse in their subject matter and execution, the three winners were unified by a continual thread: using creative thinking to provoke important but difficult conversations about social issues.

From empowering black Americans to use their right to vote, to challenging stigma around menstruation and fighting for trans and non-binary equality, the 2021 black Pencil winners embody the power of creativity as an agent of change. The fact that D&AD chose these three winners is no surprise, as the organisation has always platformed the creatives who are shaping the future.

But what does it take to produce black Pencil-worthy work during a year of immense upheaval for the creative sector? D&AD’s chief operating officer Dara Lynch sat down with this year’s three winners to unpick what inspired their work and how it came to life, shining a light on how to win one of the industry’s most coveted awards while living through a pandemic. 

In last week’s D&AD virtual ceremony, the organisation awarded three black Pencils, its highest accolade. While diverse in their subject matter and execution, the three winners were unified by a continual thread: using creative thinking to provoke important but difficult conversations about social issues.

From empowering black Americans to use their right to vote, to challenging stigma around menstruation and fighting for trans and non-binary equality, the 2021 black Pencil winners embody the power of creativity as an agent of change. The fact that D&AD chose these three winners is no surprise, as the organisation has always platformed the creatives who are shaping the future.

But what does it take to produce black Pencil-worthy work during a year of immense upheaval for the creative sector? D&AD’s chief operating officer Dara Lynch sat down with this year’s three winners to unpick what inspired their work and how it came to life, shining a light on how to win one of the industry’s most coveted awards while living through a pandemic.

"#WombStories" by AMV BBDO, which was also named D&AD’s Advertising Agency of the Year

Women animators from across the world came together to open up the many narratives and break taboos around the experiences of people with wombs.

In conversation with AMV BBDO executive creative directors Nadja Lossgott and Nicholas Hulley:

What inspired you to challenge stigmas and taboos around the experiences of people with wombs?
Bodyform is on a truth-telling journey against period taboos. On our quest to find a universal insight, we realised we’d have to resist the temptation to simplify. Oversimplification is exactly what society and culture has been guilty of doing for years: serving up the same generic narrative of womanhood, disconnected from any emotional nuances, both hiding and suppressing every experience, with devastating consequences. So instead of telling, we asked women how they felt.

How did you move from the ideation stage to creative execution?
We developed six interweaving storylines after hearing the most different life-altering stories. And worked on imagining evocative womb worlds and their womb dwellers. Their personalities, quirks and visual surroundings, and a world that housed all the experiences, inspired by macro photography. Working with an all-female group of animators, we wanted to build a rich new visual language and an explosion of evocative, organic textures that would allow us to represent these unseen experiences.

Was your creative process affected by the pandemic?
Luckily, we had already shot the live action and were pretty far down the briefing and production process of the animators bringing everything to life, which made things a tiny bit easier. Nisha Ganatra, the film director, was already working remotely from LA with us and Elise Butt, our editor, as well as the Framestore team.

The campaign spans multiple media – film, graphic design, animation etc. Why did you choose this multifaceted approach?
We wanted to reflect and acknowledge all the nuances linked to life stages, intersectionality and the coexistence of feelings, so mixing styles seemed the best way to approach a multitude of womb stories, no one experiencing the same as the other. We wanted to think of the womb as an emotional place full of stories – not just functional or logical biology. To allow everything to have a sense of the organic, the handmade or the emotional space to it.

What lessons did you learn from the process?
Never hide from complexity. Clinical data can be reimagined if you ask the right questions. Collaboration is still the most thrilling and rewarding way to work.

Read the full interviews here.