The Brief
A compelling film that captures the hearts and minds of colleagues on their first day at work, introducing them to the Barclays Mindset: Empower, Challenge, and Drive behaviours.
The Solution
Build a giant brain installation, made up of personal photographs from colleagues in India, the UK, and the US. Project these people on to a gallery wall so we can see and hear these stories from their everyday working lives that embody the Barclays Mindset.
Background
Barclays wanted to make the topic of Mindset behaviours directly applicable to everyday life at work while avoiding ambiguity and corporate spiel.
We all agreed that absorbing personal stories from colleagues, who can directly relate the Mindset behaviours with their jobs, was essential.
Working closely with the client — and several research calls later — we found our three colleagues around the world:
- A person-focused colleague in the UK, who had decided to learn sign language at night school to help one of her deaf customers; she now teaches colleagues across the UK.
- A financial colleague from the US, who is leading the way with environmentally focused enterprises.
- An Indian colleague, who invented a natural disaster resilience app that predicts the paths of cyclones, tracking them against the data of colleagues who are working from home across the subcontinent in order to maintain a robust business.
Our Approach
Covid made face-to-face filming impossible, which left video calls and sourcing colleague smartphone pictures but very little else. These restrictions forced our creative problem-solving skills to kick in and work towards something much more conceptual: To source and organise 400 colleague photos into a vast brain-shaped gallery installation to tell stories of Empower, Challenge, and Drive across the company.
Our lighting design was inspired by works like Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View by artist, Cornelia Parker, where a lone lightbulb is used at the centre of a blown-up garden shed, freeze-framed in the air at the point of explosion, to cast dramatic shadows on to the surrounding gallery walls. In a similar vein, we hung a single, high-powered LED omni at the centre of our creation. Moving this central light up and down remotely off-camera provided a dramatic movement of the photographs’ shadows around the gallery space. The final aspect of the lighting scheme was to project large typography on to the photos that make up the brain, to keep the Mindset behaviours front and centre, in the brand font and style.
At the heart of our storytelling are the projected self-recordings of our three colleagues, five metres tall and eight metres wide, filling an entire wall of the gallery space. We also see an artist, played by an actor, as she creates the installation throughout the film. Although we never really ‘meet’ her, she guides us through the narratives with curated ‘making of’ footage.
At the end of the film, there is a big reveal: The audience finally understands that they have been watching a giant brain installation, made up of photographs, being made as it is lit up, fully in shot, for the first time. A group of Barclays’ colleagues come into the gallery space to take in the installation, draw meaning from it and be inspired by it, relating everything back to the Barclays Mindset.
Impact
The feedback has been positive; colleagues have found the film inspiring, moving, and original as a standalone piece of a major internal campaign. It has had approximately 7,000 views to date, with an average of 950 views in recent months following the end of the campaign.
It’s being really well received here, and these stories, and how they’re told, are striking a chord.
Gary Sutton LEARNING DESIGNER, BARCLAYS