Concepting Disney Presence at AfroTech World 2020
As part of The Walt Disney Company's ongoing commitment to diversity and inclusion, Disney decided to participate at the 2020 AfroTech Conference. I was tasked to come up with a creative marketing campaign that not only represented Disney as a whole but as well as delivering a campaign that will speak to the targeted audience, which is predomaintly black.
As someone who is Chinese, AND NOT BLACK. This was a daunting challenge. I was terrified of misrepresenting a huge population of people. However, with the support that I had gotten, as well as partnering with other Black Creatives from other parts of the company. Through rounds of revisions, I created three concepts that I’d like to walk through in this post, and to show the final concept we landed on.
I began with research to understand the history of black art. Above is a snippet of my mood board featuring a variety of art from African art to modern Black art. The overall finding was the usage of bold colors, patterns on textile, and repeated use of a human head.
The usage of pattern on textile, homes and masks were used to classify status/class. The bold colors such as Red symbolized spiritually, while gold represented wealth and fertility. The human head shape often represented royalty. Through these culture understanding I came up with the following concepts:
Through my findings, I created three campaign designs, above are the two that were rejected. After reaching out to other Disney Black Creatives for feedback, I had learned that patterns, not only represented status but it was also used to tell a story. Each pattern had meant something significant.
The first concept on the left, I created a pattern based on African art merging with technology with the use of a circuit board, whereas the concept on the right is a mix of African patterns in bold earth tone, while ensure to feature our Cast Members in a more prominent use of space.
Based on my findings, the final concept was a merge of the two.
For the final concept, we decided to feature our Black Cast Member against a bold color contrast background that had a subtle circuit board pattern, a merge of the first and second concept.
The concept is broken down to three parts. We wanted to tell their stories, how much of an impact that they have contributed as part of Disney. The first part features our cast, then the behind the scene of the project, and finally their final product. In this case, Bridgette, a visual effects pipeline builder, worked on Marvel's Black Panther. Bridgette helped process the scene's graphic and helped deliver a box office hit.
We had chosen five amazing Black Cast as the face of this campaign, each had their own amazing story.
