WYRED Video: “Young people should have a voice”

In this post, Sofia and Cristina, the young colleagues who made the WYRED video, talk about the ideas behind it.

Adults tend to view “youth” as a homogenous group, talking of the concerns of youth as if all of us shared the same opinions and values. We are, of course, as diverse as adults, though like adults we may share some concerns.  One of the key aims in the WYRED project is to reflect and explore this diversity, and to give young people not just one voice, but as many as possible. This was the principal concept we were asked to capture in the WYRED promotional video.

When it comes to advertising an important and innovative project like WYRED, there is a need to make something different, attractive, but at the same time functional. We wanted to create a video with a strong visual meaning, with a different look to other work of this kind, and we decided to use a metaphor to transmit the central idea of WYRED.

Of course the other vital aspect is to attract the attention of the public. The metaphor technique we chose allowed us to capture the meaning of the key idea through the use of an object, in order to make it more concrete and eye-catching, and to ensure the effect of the video as a whole would be more immediate and arresting.

During the pre-production phase, we considered a wide range of objects that might be used to represent the idea of youth metaphorically. The object chosen needed to be attractive to the eye, easily recognisable, with a range of possibilities to play with (shape, colours, movement…) to show the variety and heterogeneity of youth. It also needed to be an object in some way associated with this age group. The balloon has a range of characteristics that make it an appropriate choice. It was really just what we were looking for: it’s attractive from an visual point of view, it has a large range of different forms and colours, and movements, which provided a lot of flexibility, and most important of all, it is an object that is related with youth. Adults don’t use balloons, they no longer see them as fascinating. Not only is it associated with childhood and youth, but it has associations of lightness, play, movement, lightness, vibrancy, colour and so on.

Another very important tool that we used to represent the challenge and solution involved in WYRED is light itself. We played with it as much as possible. During the first 15-20 seconds of the video the balloons are not well lit, but as the voiceover moves to describe the potential of young people they become more and more well-lit until eventually they are freed to float in the sunlight as the WYRED solution is described.

And last but not least, another key element was the voiceover. The images were very important but the tricky part came with the sound. We didn’t want that the weight of the meaning and purpose of the video to be carried only by the images or the sound. There needed to be a balance with voice accompanying image and visa versa. Furthermore, to reinforce the notion of diversity we chose to have a combination of different voices rather than just one, We hope you like it!