Thank you so much to everyone who entered their cause-driven live and film work into the EVCOM Clarion Awards this 2021. Despite the circumstances of the last year and the impact of the pandemic on our sector, the entry level was only down 12% from last year, highlighting the importance of celebrating this type of work.
The range of entries said a lot about trends across the live and film industries. On the film side, the difficulties surrounding live location shooting were clear, and the responses to it creative. We saw a lot of UGC, but unlike the UGC that dominated our screens and social media at the beginning of the pandemic, this UGC was consistently of an incredibly high quality. There was less of a focus on drama, and where filming was possible, a lot of the work was a single person or two people to camera, rather than larger groups. We also saw an increase of animation work.
Interestingly the content of the pieces themselves appear to have been impacted by the pandemic. A common tone was one of reflection, introspection, a gentle tone which chimes with the year we’ve all had. There were more longer pieces (8 – 10 minutes) with a focus on taking the time to go into detail and cover a larger amount of ground. Interestingly there was also an increase in the use of spoken word and poetry to great effect.
We also saw more of a spread of entries across the categories this year, indicating that companies have been taking this time to build on their comms surrounding diversity and inclusion, sustainability, wellbeing and more. And this is not just charities or not for profits, but big brands identifying the importance of spending time talking to their customers and/or employees about the bigger issues.
Our esteemed panel of client and agency judges are looking through all the entries as we speak, and we can’t wait to hear what they think of them! Once again, a huge thank you to all of brilliant entrants for sharing your work with this scheme. We look forward to celebrating it.