Advertising students showcase work promoting unsigned recording artists

Third year BA (Hons) Advertising and Brand Design students showcased a series of ‘animations, films and identity systems’ promoting unsigned recording artists as part of ‘Unsigned Stories’, held within Apple’s London office.

During the project, students were tasked with creating a visual narrative to represent an unsigned artist of their choice. They began by conducting exchanges with their artist, researching the stories they wanted to tell across social media, online and on traditional media platforms.

The students discovered a number of moving, personal tales, from singer Marwan Abousaid fleeing Lebanon in the 1990s, to how dance music DJ LaChie rebuilt his life after a series of kidney transplants. Students used a range of approaches to present their projects; one group developed a series of vibrant stop motion animations for drum and bass artist DJ Psyc-o, while another created an augmented reality installation for the Czechoslovakian singer Samuel Tomeček.

Students also enjoyed a number of workshops including an exclusive ‘Today at Apple’ session — these were designed to educate and inspire using iPad Pro with Apple Pencil and MacBook Pro. The course cohort attended the store in Covent Garden to master tools like Procreate and iMovie.

Further to this, global brand agency, Moving Brands, chaired workshops with leading creatives working in the music industry, including artist Sunil Pawar, Jonathan Wilkins aka Dines, founder of Studio BLUP and Steve Stacey, who has worked on campaigns for everyone from Olly Murs to Calvin Harris.

Commenting, BA (Hons) Advertising and Brand Design student Kristine Kokina said, “The amount of support that we got from Moving Brands and Apple was great and the opportunity really motivated us to do our best, making sure we represented our artist well. We chose a DJ called Dan and Out, creating a vinyl recording full of his stories. Side A focuses on Dan’s first music memories and the beginning of his DJ journey. On side B Dan talks about the importance of the audience and we capture the audience response to his performance. We also produced two videos, one for each side of the vinyl.”

Derek Yates, Course Leader, BA (Hons) Advertising and Brand Design added, "We pride ourselves on creating a learning environment that allows our students to engage directly with the people who might employ them. The work on display within the exhibition at Apple represents the tip of an iceberg of valuable learning experiences, a small taste of what the students have got from a project that connects with industry. From researching networks, initiating conversations, building trust, sustaining relationships and negotiating a brief with their musicians they built expertise that will provide a vital foundation for their future creative work. It’s been a truly transformative experience."