Best of CASE Europe Region Award
 

Institution: Leeds Beckett University

Title of entry: Poetry with power: Building our art school brand

About this entry: Our Leeds School of Arts (LSA) has ambitious growth plans across our undergraduate and international markets. Our brief from the Dean was to create a video showing the new £80m home of LSA, which opened during the pandemic, to use in our campaign and across our owned digital channels.

Though the brief was a simple showcase of the facilities, we were determined to come up with a show-stopping idea to build the brand, to help us compete with specialist local and national arts institutions.

We wanted to show passion, excitement and a sense of belonging, and what better way to do that than showcasing our talented students and alumni. We began with a new poem from alumni Zodwa Nyoni, a Zimbabwean-born poet and playwright, which Zodwa performs as the main protagonist. Then we created performance ‘stories’ reflecting student experiences and the themes in the poem, used a mix of filming approaches, and edited it into something which is a game changer in our content for the school.