The video from DoodleDo Motion – ‘Manchester, we’ll be back on our feet’ – caught all of our attention at the weekend, striking a chord with us just at that very moment when we needed a reminder of all things great about our city.
It has now had nearly half a million views across twitter, facebook and instagram and has been shared about 8,000 times. Have a read of our latest blog from creator of the video, James Torry, Founder of DoodleDo Motion, and the process behind the compilation.
“Like most agencies in our discipline, the past couple of weeks saw our pipeline evaporate, very few commissions coming our way and the extension of our collective vocabulary to include the word ‘furlough’. I’m hopeful that as things settle down, people will want to either get content out now, or get ready, but until then, what do you do?
We’re creatives, you go mad if you can’t create. So on Wednesday night, I sat at my new home office desk in the spare room, surrounded by the washing and the clutter you accumulate when your loft overflows, to write some thoughts down.
There’s lots of messaging out there at the moment. ‘Business as usual’, well, that’s not us right now. And then everything between scientific insight and practical wisdom, to scaremongering and proliferation of fear. But we all have a voice, and I wanted our agency’s to be used to spread hope. Even before writing this, we paid our suppliers early, got in touch with our freelancers to see if we could help bridge the gap between now and government help, contacted customers to see how they were doing, and paid for some freelancer days upfront to try and help.
But this poem was the creative expression of that. The thought I think we all share, that this will pass, it’s temporary. That life won’t exactly return to how it was, but there’s a chance it might be better. That the glimpses we see of kindness and connection in the midst of this, could just maybe be held dear to the point that we cherish them beyond the Covid-19 chapter of Manchester, and in to whatever our future looks like.
And then on a practical level, we’ve been around a while, so we’ve quite large archives of footage. We dug it out, re-purposed and added some motion graphics. We needed a VO, and over a conversation with one of our clients, they made an introduction to Clint Boon who didn’t even really ask any questions. He was just up for it straight away, loved the idea, and recorded what might be the least Clint Boon voiceover I might have imagined (it’s not exactly Boon Army now is it?) and yet delivered it so authentically and beautifully that it captured the heart and tone perfectly.
It was written Wednesday night, and on our social channels by Saturday. And in the last 48 hours, it’s been shared thousands of times and viewed over 250,000 times. Quite remarkable. But that’s the Manchester spirit isn’t it? There’s something unique about this place that we share. It’s defiant, and it is hope filled. And I’m convinced the other side of this (and maybe even the process of getting there) looks more beautiful than the hardship in between.”
James Torry
Founder, Doodledo.
