NAACP March on Washington 2020

Category

Social Action Campaign

Client

NAACP

Country

USA

Runtime

1:20 min

Date

2020

The NAACP had planned a massive event for the summer of 2020: a March on Washington that would mirror the 1963 March with Martin Luther King, and address present day civil rights issues, specifically voting rights and police brutality. When our conversation with the NAACP began, we found that the best way Prodigium could contribute to the NAACP's mission was to give the March on Washington additional traction online through a video made for social media.

Visit the NAACP

Development

Our first step with this goal in mind was to do our research on the audience we needed to reach: Who needed additional inspiration to take action? Who wasn’t being reached by other communication methods by the NAACP?

We did a great deal of research in collaboration to arrive at the final creative, led by Prodigium's producer/director Tessa Byford and the NAACP's VP of Marketing Trovon Williams. Our primary finding was that people have often struggled to experience the historical meaning of an action they take in the present, specifically attending a march. When a person goes to a march, they usually experience it with friends; it's a day's worth of being outside, holding signs and standing up for what you believe in, but by the time it's over, it feels like a fleeting moment that has passed. In reality of course, the big picture of a successful protest sets a sign in local or national media, and might lead to political changes down the line. It's hard to see that big picture when you're just one person attending the protest.

This was our guiding insight, so our director Tessa Byford suggested to the NAACP that we should build a video that allows the audience to experience the groundbreaking March on Washington in 1963 from the eyes of a person attending, and juxtaposing those images with a modern day NAACP March, leading up to what they'd experience at the March on Washington in 2020. Additionally, Tessa felt it was important to have a guiding voice over from someone that attended the 1963 March alongside MLK and could speak to young people of today.

Trovon Williams identified the perfect narrator: Courtland Cox, an original member of the Southern activist organization SNICC, who has contributed significant leadership to the Civil Rights movement, and knew MLK from marching with him in 1963.

Ava discovered this issue and worked tirelessly for two years to build a solution to the problem: An app that would transcribe conversations by using the participants’ smartphone microphones through speech recognition. By having multiple phones present and building voice profiles, the app is able to distinguish between voices and create a chat bubble-like transcription of the conversation. The deaf person can easily read along and contribute to the conversation by typing and using text to speech – all within Ava.

Production

Due to early-stag COVID-19, we weren't able to do this interview in person, so we set up a video call with Cox. We asked him to record his voice over on an iPhone, knowing that with the proper post mix and sweetening we'd get close enough to a professional vocal track.The interview took 1.5 hours, which we transcribed and shared with NAACP staff for a shared initial highlighting session of the most memorable sound bites and the key messages the NAACP wanted to include.

Tessa filtered through a myriad of choices, eventually cutting down the 1.5 hour interview into a 90 second voice-over narration. We decided that instead of writing a script and having Courtland simply read it, we wanted to opt for the far more complicated but equally more authentic strategy of interviewing Courtland and using snippets of the interview to build the narration.

Many of the best soundbites were clearly Courtland's authentic thoughts as a civil rights leader of his era, phrases which no expert copywriting team could have come up with.

This 90 second voice over was grown around a structure that Tessa had chosen to address what the audience might be feeling, and taking them on a meaningful journey. Building on the archival and crowdsourcing lessons we learned on Making a Better Now, we linked up with NAACP chapters across the country to obtain protest, rally and organizing footage - as well as receiving stunning footage contributions from Kyle Kotajarvi and Sheen Jamaal (Pinilla Productions).

Further research unearthed a high quality 20-something minute digitized film reel from the Library of Congress depicting the March on Washington in 1963. With much of the footage now available, Tessa led the editorial effort of finding similar visual motifs, such as a father holding his son, both in 1963 and 2020 - which allowed for beautiful juxtapositions that made it clear to the audience:

when you participate - be it in 1962 or 2020 - you're part of history.