The D&AD student winners
How they came up with the EA Peace Day idea (in the words of Martin): "Our response to the White Pencil brief was truly a collaborative effort. The idea simply would not have come about if we hadn't been working as a team."
"Our first approach was, in the usual manner of these things, to flounder around like horny salmon in a jacuzzi, leaping to answers and execution with unfocused abandon. After a short while, we realised we needed to reframe the question. Martin saw that the worst thing we could do was just expect ordinary people to care about wars and conflict in distant countries - this approach would surely only attract the usual suspects; the habitually charitable. Instead, we needed find a place where the concepts of peace and conflict already existed in people's minds and in people's lives - and target them there."
"Armed with this new brief, Olly came up with the idea of a football game within a military video game, such as Call Of Duty - reflecting the 1914 Christmas truce in the trenches. Unfortunately, research suggested that coding such an event would be nigh-on impossible, but then Martin found that Electronic Arts owned both one of the biggest war games and the biggest football game on the planet - Battlefield and FIFA. This was the true birth of the idea."
"From that point, everything just seemed to slot into place. Olly discovered how in-game advertising could be used to send gamers teasers about the event. Martin spotted the letters "EA" lurking inside the word "peace", and after a brief interlude of demented hyperventilation, told Olly, who put together the logo."
"Olly created and edited the video, Photoshopping the various scenes and executions. Martin wrote and - after multiple revisions - voiced the script. As well as our own efforts, a great deal of credit goes to our teachers and mentors at the School of Communication Arts 2.0 - whose help, advice, and encouragement was vital in the production of the video."
About Olly Wood:
Olly Wood studied Graphic Design and worked for a while as a designer, then an artworker. However, he got bored of just making things look nice, and discovered a passion for actually creating the concepts himself, which led to a post as a Junior Art Director at a small agency.
However, for Olly, this was still not enough - so he took a big gamble and quit his job to enrol in the School of Communication Arts, so he could really learn the craft of advertising right from strategy to execution, find a partner, and break into the big agencies.
He was successful on all three counts.
Along the way, he's spent a year in South America where he lost about 13kg but found a wife, left bird boxes and forged banknotes around London, and fooled the world into thinking he was the crime-fighting Tunbridge Wells Ninja.
About Martin Headon:
Martin Headon was one of those annoying boys who never had to try hard at school. The downside to this was never learning the more important lesson that life might require a little effort, and after numerous dead-end jobs he ended up as an account manager / dogsbody at a small and obscure design agency on the fringes of civilisation in West London.
In this role, he started writing headlines and copy for adverts, websites, and leaflets, because no-one else would or could. He found that he enjoyed the writing far more than the placating clients, so like Olly did, he took the plunge and joined the School of Communication Arts, where he discovered a new-found confidence in both his ability to write and his capacity for hard work.
When he's not immersed in advertising, Martin collects discarded shopping lists from the trolleys outside East Dulwich Sainsbury's, plays guitar, and takes a photo of every cat he meets.
See the winning video here.
