Connexions/Faces in Focus, Peabody and Poached Creative have all come together to work on a new 'Staying Safe' poster campaign. The poster will be created during weekly sessions, where at least eight young people will learn how to run a successful campaign. Made up of 13-19 year olds, the sessions aim to help all participants gain new skills and have a positive effect on other young people. You can follow our weekly progress through our blogs.
We were introduced to a lady called Sarah Scarsbrook who came to speak to us about distribution for our poster.
Who will we give the poster to and how will we get our message across?
We discussed and came up with a list of who we would send our poster to and how many we would need. Sarah talked about a good way to put all the information in one place, which was to put it in a chart that she handed us out. She mentioned that it was important to spread out distribution responsibilities. These are just a few ideas that were mentioned:
- Talks in schools
- Job centres
- Talks in youth centres
- YOT
- Mayor (letter)
- Government (letter)
- Media (letter, press release)
- Housing notice boards
- Peabody head office
- Colleges
- Council boards
We shared out the responsibilities of distribution between the group and everyone will take charge of one specific place that we will take our poster to.
QR Codes
Sarah discussed how important QR codes are now and that it gives people the opportunity to scan it and walk away and still be able to access where we will be taking them to. This is something we will have to look at so that we know where the best place for our audience is to be taken. We agreed that Facebook or Twitter would be our best bet. We looked at our QR code from our blog and saw how effective that it was.
She gave us some free websites that we can generate a QR code for our poster from.
- Smarty tags
- Kimtag
Surveys
Sarah explained that surveys work as a measure of finding out of people are understanding our message and if it was effective for them. She gave us some websites where we can create free surveys for our Facebook, etc.
- Survey Monkey
- Survey Gizmo
Poster Sizes
Sarah discussed poster sizes with us and we all agreed that we will have them printed in A4, A3 and A2 sizes.
A special thanks to Sarah for coming in to speak to us about distribution.
Poster Launch
Katy Dawe from Art Against Knives has agreed for us to hold our poster launch party at her shop in Boxpark in Shoreditch. It will be on 12/01/12 from 6-8pm in The Art Against Knives shop.
Choosing Our Final Photograph
We all looked through Niall's final photographs and chose the one photo that we thought was the best to go on our poster. The image was 0033, which you will have to watch this space for the final poster to see. We are all really excited as our poster has come together brilliantly.
Writing A Letter To Boris
To finish the session we all worked on a letter to send to Boris Johnson. We worked really hard to word it and we all hope that he can make it to our poster launch to support our campaign. All that is left to do know is to wait for the response.
We went away for a weekend residential to Swindon on 9 December 2011 to spend some time completing our project. The residential was with PGL, who offered us a lot of team activities alongside some morning sessions, which helped us to completion point of our campaign. Residential – Day 1
We left London in the morning and headed up to Swindon PGL by minibus. We arrived in time for lunch then headed outside for some activities. We did a zip wire activity, then learnt some survival skills. We spent the evening team building with some team tournaments of darts and table tennis, which everybody really enjoyed.
Residential – Day 2 AM - Media challenge
We started the morning off with a team challenge.
Group Activity:
The scenario was that the world had been taken over by adults who are rounding up and imprisoning all under 24s. It was down to us to organise a revolution to defend our age group from unjust incarceration.
Our challenge was to create a short video broadcast to call all under 24s across the UK and fight the oppression.
The video had to be:
- Shot in one take
- Less than one minute long
We uploaded our videos to YouTube and then watched them all together.
We were introduced to the idea that this residential was all about the future. To get a clear vision for our campaign and know what success would be, we did an exercise where we put ourselves two months into the future after the campaign had launched.
How does it feel?
- Great!
- See the changes we’ve affected
- Strong impact
- People thinking positive
- Putting away knives and guns and getting stuck into education
- Boris Johnson, Barak Obama and David Cameron support our campaign
How many people have we reached (young people)?
- 7,372
What do people think?
- Opened their eyes
- Best poster they’ve ever seen
- 95% positive feedback
- 3% didn’t understand
- 2% negative
Where’s the best places people have seen the poster?
- Buses/bus stops
- West end McDonalds - instead of a toy, a poster
- Tube
- Westminster
- Newspapers – top story (Metro, Evening Standard, South London press)
- Downing Street
What do you plan to do next?
- Start a new project
We then looked at everyone’s personal stories and why we all care about the campaign.
Personal stories
We split up into two groups and interviewed everyone, one at a time whilst everyone else made notes. We discussed and decided who will represent the group by telling their stories if asked by the press, etc.
- Name, age and where you live
- What was your best experience growing up?
- What has your experience been of knife crime or the effects of knife crime?
- How did that make you feel?
- What do you think the effects were on other people i.e. victim, victim’s family, perpetrator, etc.?
- What do you want to say to people who might become involved with knife crime?
- How do you think this poster campaign could help?
We reviewed our footage so far and decided on what we would use to send to the video editor to be edited professionally.
PM
After lunch we all headed out for some more team building activities. These were trapeze and quad biking which was really great fun and very muddy.
Day 3 AM - Presentation and public speaking
We started off the session by discussing a group activity:
Set the scene - You've been invited back to the Salmon Centre to launch your poster campaign with their football group at the end of the matches. There will be 20 young people, aged 12-15 years old and you've go 3 minutes to find out:
What do you want them to go away thinking? - Think about how important life is
- How knife crime can affect them
What do you want them to feel?
- Guilty
- Ashamed
- Aware/a bit scared
How would you like them to describe it to their friends?
- Carrying a knife isn't good
We looked at speeches and what makes a good one. We watched a YouTube video of the world famous speech 'I have a dream' by Martin Luther King.
We discussed what worked well about the speech:
- Repetition
- Relating to his audience
- Inclusive
- Rhythm
- Contrast
- Metaphor
- Makes it personal
- Quotes
- Holds to account
We did an exercise as individuals, after being handed a sheet of knife crime stats. This was to look at how we will address people, i.e. the media with some form of speech.
We had to answer the following questions:
- What's your key message?
- What stats would you use?
- How would you explain your reason for doing the poster?
We had to see what stats that we had remembered during our discussion as the average person listens to approx 17% of a presentation:
- Knife crime in London is up by 23%
- Lambeth has the highest rate of knife crime
- 2076 knife crime incidents in London
- Knife crime has rised from 13.6% since 2006
We looked at AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire and Action) and how we can get people's attention. We split onto three groups and acted out how we would approach and get young people interested in our campaign. Some ideas were:
- Play pool/a game
- Make a deal
- Use sweets
Campaign message and social media
We all finalised our campaign message and name and looked at some of the campaigns that have already been done.
We decided on the text:
- Is this the life you want? - as our main rhetorical question on the poster
- Your choice, your future - we decided to use as our logo and at the bottom of our poster
Finally we set up a campaign Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and WordPress account so that we can promote our campaign, keep everyone updated, etc.
PM
Some of the group did an aeroball activity. We all recorded a short video of what the main thing we got out of the weekend.
Everybody had a really great weekend and learnt lots of new skills including team building and all about speeches.
We began our session by finalising plans for the residential that we are going on as part of our campaign 09/12/11 – 11/12/11. We discussed the update from Niall, the photographer and Aaron, the illustrator on feedback that we gave on the illustrations from last week’s session.
We were introduced to Jonathan Barnbrook, who is a well known graphic designer of one of the evolution poster’s we looked at for inspiration for this campaign.
Jonathan talked to us about:
- Looking at what a poster is
- Gave us a break-down of what a graphic designer is – somebody who organises information for people to understand it and put across what’s important
- He is a less commercial graphic designer
- One person’s directive thought creates a poster
He talked us through some examples of good and bad posters:
Obama ‘hope’ poster:
- Simple
- Example of a good poster
- Expressing the spirit
Briton wants you poster:
- Appeals to patriotism
- Addresses the viewer directly
- Simple
Labour isn't working poster:
- Got direct statement
- Says action
New labour, new danger poster:
- Bad example
- You remember it for the wrong reasons
Use spades, not ships poster:
- Clever
Anatomy of Murder film poster:
- Simple
- Makes you want to investigate more
Jaws film poster:
- Sums everything up in the poster
American Beauty film poster:
- Simplicity helps
- Great poster
Osama Bin Laden and Ronald McDonald poster:
- Humour makes people think, and raises a smile
- KGI poster
- Two extremes
Things to consider when creating a poster:
- Keep it simple and do lots of promotion
- "If everything is shouting, then nobody can hear.”
- They should “inform and condense”
- A good poster stays around for a long time
- It has got to attract attention!
- Simplify your poster – make sure you know what you are trying to say
- Simple elements, don’t try to complicate
We had a questions and answers session with Jonathon and learnt about what being an art director involves:
Jonathan also gave us some feedback on our poster:
We looked at the test photographs that Niall’s assistant, Ryan took with a few members of the group last week.
Here is the feedback we all gave:
General feedback
- Interested in having a muted background.
- Need a lot of pavement – for the evolution line to stand on
- Need a building in the background
- Want it to be duller
Image 019
- Like the scene
- Not sure about the building in the background
- The colours are decent
Image 028
- Looks decent
- Like the pavement/space
- Building looks decent
Image 044
- It would be better if it was from the side angle, with the pavement in the foreground
Image 055
- Liked the ‘no more war’ graffiti
Image 057
- Like the long pathway
- Like the background
- The colours in the green leaves, etc are vibrant and look good
We started the session with a recap of last week’s session and were updated on residential plans on the 09/12/11-11/12/11 – we will cover Twitter, public information and have presentation training.
We discussed our poster and sizing:
- A4 so that it can be down-sized for smaller printing, i.e. notice boards, etc.
- A3 so that it can be up-sized to a billboard.
- Take the poster into probation team - they will help to get it out there.
Photography update:
A few members of the group went to Haygate estate to take some test shots with Niall’s assistant, Ryan. Everyone who went said that they had a really great time and that ‘they took hundreds of photos’.
- We need to get permission to shoot at Haygate
- This will be the final location for the backdrop
- We will give feedback on the photos that they took next week 07/12/11
We looked at Aaron’s rough illustration plans and gave feedback:
Image 1 – Toddler (3)
-The blocks to spell out ‘STOP’
- Everything else looks good
-Blocks to be in colour
Image 2 – Primary school (10)
-Write his name on his school book
-His name is Adam
-Everything else looks good
Image 3 – Secondary school (12)
-He looks like a bad boy
-The shirt and tie need to be open and a bit more loose
-He needs to be a bit more messy looking
-Put his hand actually on the fag box that he is stealing from image 4 – it links the images together better!
Image 4 – Secondary school (16)
-Remove the object that he has in his hand (left)
-Have him smoking a fag with his spare hand
Image 5 – Unemployed (17)
-Have him holding a bloody knife instead of the skull
-Have the blood red
Image 6 – Prison (18)
-Needs to look more shocked/ more emotion
-Put him on his knees looking at image 7 – a gravestone with his name on it
The evolution line will go up and then down again to show life and then death.
Image 7 - Death (18)
- Don’t use death
-Have a gravestone with his name written on it – Adam
-He is kneeling looking at the gravestone – looking death in the face
Notes
-The blocks and the blood will be in colour
-The images looked really awesome
Group Activities We split up into groups and 1 group went off to do video interviews whilst the other group worked on both PEST (Political, Economic, Social, and Technological)and SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses/Limitations, Opportunities, and Threats) analyses.
Today's session started a recap from last week's session and a catch up on the project timetable. The outcome of the session is to brief the illustrator and the photographer.
We were introduced to Aaron who will be working with us a our poster illustrator. He told us a bit about himself and passed around some products he had worked on and his portfolio. His work is amazing.
- His inspirations are Japan
- Draws images in then scans them
- Uses fine liners to do all of his pieces
- He has worked on stuff for the Playstation game 'Lonely Planet', murals, t-shirts, etc.
We were introduced to the photographer, Niall who will be working with us to create the photography for the poster. He is a really well known photographer who worked on the poster for tv show, Top Boy. We were all really impressed by Niall.
We all discussed the vision for this project:
- Niall - the poster's background - blocks, rough, estates, negative
- Aaron - illustrate the people in the evolution line
The evolution poster will be giving the worst case scenario. Leading to death and jail.
We all discussed with Niall and Aaron:
- Sizing is important for the poster
- Black and white - more powerful
- Shoot in colour and mute colour
We looked at the evolution stages and after much formating we came up with:
1. Toddler (3)
2. Primary school age (10)
3. Secondary school age (12)
4. Secondary school age (16)
5. Unemployed (17)
6. Prison/death (18)
Group activity:
The group split up into teams of two, Niall worked with one group and Aaron worked with the other group. The task was to look at and plan all of the stages of the evolution poster.
- It needs to be consistant as it is building a character and this will link them together better.
The group discussed that the guy on the evolution poster will be side on.
1. Toddler
- Start off good as there's more to loose
- Playing with toys - perhaps toy blocks spelling out 'Stop'
- Dressed in spiderman or superman t-shirt
- Happy
2. Primary school
- Messy uniform - to big - hand-me-downs
- With hoody - negative
- Holding football under his arm - positive
3. Secondary school - 12
- Stealing fags out of his older self's pocket - links it together (image 4)
- Uniform untucked
- Trainers
4. Secondary school - 16
- Messy school uniform
- Fag behind his ear
- Bad looking - knife in his belt - on the same side as younger self (image 3) steals fags from
- On his phone
- Bunking school
- Dealing drugs
5. Unemployed - 17
- Tattoo - mum, dead or alive
- He's robbed someone and stabbed them
- Blood on his hands
- Scruffy
- Canabis
- He's a big guy in his community
6. Dead/in prison - 18
- In prison staring death in the face
- Behind bars
We all discussed ideas of where we may like to shoot some of the photography.
- Haygate
- Wood Green
Real objects in the poster - blocks, knife, fags, the background.
We were all asked to look at locations to shoot our photography at:
- Somewhere with a lot of open space
- Take some test shots for the photographer
Residential plans were completed and everybody filled in feedback forms.
Updates:
Tuesday 29/11/11 the group will meet with a friend of Niall's (the photographer) and scout out some locations and take some test shots.
The session kicked off with introductions and updates from last week's session and the youth feedback from The Salmon Centre. This week's session will be about social networks and their importance whilst working on campaigns.
Social network sites offer a great way of reaching your audience, measuring their response or commitment to your campaign or sharing your message.
We looked at some social media stats:
How many hours do U24s spend on the internet a week, not counting on mobiles?
- We all made guesses of 60? and 100? hours
The facts are:
- U24s spend an average of 31 hours online a week, much of this is on social networking sites.
Task:
Name as many social media websites as you can?
- Facebook
- The new Google feature
- Twitter
- High 5
- MySpace
- Tagged
- Piczo
- Profile Pics
- YouTube
- Skype
- PS3/Xbox 360
- FlickR
- Tweet Deck
- Tumblr
- Dating sites
- Bebo - died a long time ago
We talked about what they all do and agreed that they all do different things but for the same purposes. They are all about communication and sharing. We discussed how social networks have evolved from MySpace - Facebook - Twitter.
We looked at Facebook next and the stats are staggering:
- 1 billion users
- 1/2 the UK population are on Facebook
- The average person spends 14 minutes a day or 7 hours a month on Facebook
- Facebook counts for 44% of social network interaction
98% of everyone in our group has a Facebook account - it's powerful, people are on it
Do it on Facebook - things can be spread faster and easier and you can track and measure response.
Group Task 1:
In groups we looked at:
How/why do people use Facebook?
- Profile
- Games
- Promote your company
- Ruin people's lives - bullying, etc
- Sharing videos, pictures, music, etc
- Chat
- To like things
- Find family and friends
- Plan events
- Find out about events
- Follow your fav bands, celebs, etc
- Video chat
- Share links
- Organise
- Vote
- Polls
How do they talk to each other?
- Casually
- With slang
- Reminders
What else can Facebook do?
- Start a revolution
- Act as a petition
- Brands
- Builds contacts and communication
Make sure that there's enough information in your profile so people know facts and enough about your campaign and the people behind it.
We were left with a few questions to consider:
- Which ones will work for you?
- Do you want Facebook to be personal or a computer?
We looked at campaigns that had used Facebook successfully:
This week we had mock up of last week's poster ideas to take to a youth centre called The Salmon Youth Centre for feedback.
We discussed the poster's as a group before leaving and this is the feedback and the suggestions that we came up with:
- Black shadows and one person standing and saying, "you are not alone."
- An older person - trust worthy with a hand on a shoulder.
- Somebody dropping the knife in a bin in stead of on a table and then saying "Let It Go".
- It should be bold - strong impact.
- The poster doesn't have enough impact - the pose.
- The photograph should be the knife in motion being thrown away or being dropped.
- The evolution should be the steps progressing to how they got involved with knife crime.
- They should all be in the same scene.
- The person should actually be going through each stage.
- Strong Point - show an image of the person's face in prison.
The idea is that we are trying to use the poster concept with the most impact, making it more shocking.
We devised a list of questions to ask young people at The Salmon Centre to get their opinions on the poster concepts:
- What are your experiences of knife crime?
- If one of your friends was involved with knife crime, what would you say to them?
- How do you think these posters relate to you?
- What do you think these posters mean?
- What would you change about the posters?
- Which poster do you think is the best?
When we arrived the young people were playing football, so their coach sent them out in groups of 4/5. We decided to ask them questions as one big group and change the order of the questions around to suit.
Group 1
(5 young people)
- They had no experience of knife crime
- They will listen to people who have been there before
- Well respected if it's somebody famous
- The Gigs poster was more effective
- Don't make it to fancy - just simple and bold
- Use a bold picture with not much writing
- Something that catches your eye
- You're not alone - has no point - gives the wrong idea
- Likes the 'evolution' idea and the 'nobody's going to change your life but you' idea to
- With a celeb - the Gigs poster looks a bit like a song poster
- The 'nobody's going to change your life but you' poster looks like it's for older kids aged 17+
The youth group's manager mentioned that they had somebody come in and talk about knife crime a while ago and that the topic is very hot on the agenda right now.
Group 2
(5 young people)
- 1 young person knew somebody effected by knife crime
- There's always a reason someone gets stabbed
- It's not good though.
- Let it go and only you can change posters give a good message
- You're not alone - gives the wrong reason
- Only you can change - they said that they would look at it if they saw it
We were all discovering that this was the correct age to target our poster at as they have not even considered or thought of anything to do with knife crime yet. We can get our message to them before they even get involved with gangs, etc to warn them off of it.
Group 3
(4 young people)
- 1 of the young people knew somebody who's friend was stabbed
- Knife crime is bad
- All of the ideas are good
- The Gigs poster is best
- Evolution would really make them think and they would tell their mates about it.
We finished up the session with a group discussion of how we had got on with the feedback and what we had learnt.
This week we arrived at session 3 and everybody learnt about insights and how to put them into practice and come up with an initial idea for a poster. It's all coming together now and everybody is really enthusiastic to make this happen.
The session began with a brief recap from last weeks session and then an introduction about this week. We looked at the focus this week, which was on concepts and that we would look at:
- Who is the audience for the poster?
- How will we talk to them?
Then we all went over knife crime statistics that had been researched earlier in the day. The findings of the stats were really interesting:
- The Metropolitan Police crime statistics - they show that knife crime rates have risen in the past 12 months.
- The Government crime research statistics - an assessment of the Tackling Knives and Serious Youth Violence Action Programme (TKAP).
- This article from The Guardian newspaper talks about the new mandatory tougher punishments for knife crime.
Insight: boys will do anything to appear more attractive to girls.
- They are selling you a girl - saying that lynx brings you women
- For men 16+
Gym membership
Insight: exercise is a saturated market where there is not much difference between products. Fitness4less has a cheekier personality and users don't mind a sense of humour.
- We are just like you - appeals to your nature
- Aimed at cheeky people
Dixon's
Insight: whilst people wanted experience and top end goods they're realistic enough to want to save money too. This campaign offers both and makes the buyer feel smart.
- Selfridge's play on words - good for the tube as it has more text.
- Mixes fonts and colours
- Aimed at families and other people who want good products and can't afford Selfridge's
Volkswagen
Insight: We've all tried to control space/time with our minds as children.
- Appealing to all of our child-like sides
- Everyone's done it
- This aims it at everyone
Everybody split up into groups to create mood boards with magazine cuttings of ideas for the posters. All of the ideas were really great. Here is the video of the groups presenting their ideas.
We looked at:
- What do you want to say to the audience
- Who the typical person may be
We discussed:
- Poster 1 was more effective
- Elements of poster 3 were strong to (bullying) - you're not alone
- Key insight - no-one can change your life but you and you're not alone - what words will you use?
- How will you help with your poster? will you signpost to support services?
Staying in the same groups we came up with some insights. These were the ideas:
The insights and mood boards are being taken to a designer, who will do mock-up posters of all of the group's concepts to get feedback from young people in next week's session.
Finally we discussed residential ideas with everybody and as long as all of the activities are included nobody minds where the location is. Evaluation sheets were all filled in and the session came to an end.
News On The Project:
-
A designer is interested in coming on board with the poster. He was
the man behind one of the evolution posters that we looked at last week
featuring the evolution line and a soldier at the end. He owns a
successful design company called Barnbrook.
- A photographer is also interested in working with us, have a look at Niall O'Brien's website.
We are now in the second week of the project and everyone is very excited and passionate about what we are working on. This session we welcomed a guest speaker, Katy Dawe. Katy founded her own charity, Art Against Knives after her friend was stabbed 2 years ago, leaving him in a wheelchair.
Katy gave an introduction about her charity and its history and held everyone's attention with her presentation and speech about campaigning and what's important.
Here are some of the things she covered, which were really helpful to our campaign.
- Knife crime doesn't have to happen!
- The papers are interested, especially when there is a personal story involved
- It's useful to ask yourself how you are engaged
- Personal stories are powerful - it's important to make your campaign more personal as it is more effective
- Know your campaign and be able to sum it up in one sentence
- Call to action - what do you want people to do?
- The parents and the young people both get punished for the crime
