How AMV BBDO changed the narrative about wombs with #wombstories
AMV BBDO won nine Pencils at this year’s D&AD Awards, including one of only three Black Pencils for their visceral film #wombstories. Winning the highest accolade for Art Direction, the ad for Bodyform brought animators from across the world together to change the narrative around periods and wombs.
“#wombstories started with the insight that periods are usually treated as a functional thing,” says Executive Creative Director of AMV BBDO, Nadja Lossgott. “This single narrative we all get taught at school of – you get your period at 12, you will have a little bit of pain maybe; it repeats every 28 days, you will then get married, you will then have two children, and then you and your irrelevant body can quietly retire into the darkness.”
Lossgott and her fellow Executive Creative Director Nicholas Hulley focussed instead on the emotional experiences outside this single narrative – the ones that often “live in silence, in shame and in fear of being aired.” We caught up with the duo to understand what it took to create Black Pencil-winning work that started conversations and made people with wombs finally feel understood. Watch the video, or read the quick takeaways below.
#wombstories, AMV BBDO
Using metaphors to describe emotions
The team broadly knew the subject matters they wanted to touch upon, but they didn’t have the “emotional expressions of those experiences.” Hulley says, “We were going to use that as a research tool, by asking not what your experience is, but ‘Can you tell us about your experience in metaphorical ways?’ We were using metaphorical questions, a bit like art therapy does. So, [what] if your womb was a person, a place – and that’s what we were cultivating and getting back from the research. And of course, what was profound and incredible was all these unheard and unseen stories coming back to us in these incredibly poetic ways.”
#wombstories, AMV BBDO
Incorporating lived experiences
One of the film’s animators, Carine Khalife – who brought the endometriosis monster to life – has endometriosis herself, and Lossgott explains how this helped convey genuine emotion.
“The expressions of these metaphorical worlds were so important, and that they would viscerally land within the people watching,” says Lossgott. “I think that that expression, and the visceral nature of her artwork, that pain, and the feeling, and the anger within the expression of that really comes across, and really lands with you, as the viewer, in articulating a disease and a condition that is so incredibly hard to articulate and recognise.”
Creating a safe space for people with wombs to to tell their story
The team experienced a “profound outpouring” once they had given people a platform to speak about their emotional experiences. “I think that as soon as one person started sharing, then another person and another 10 started sharing, and the multiplied effect of that, and the unity that that allows… was absolutely incredible to see,” says Lossgott
“The intention was never just to tell a film with a couple of stories. The intention was always for that film to be a tool for other people to end up sharing their own stories, because there are so, so many out there.”
#wombstories, AMV BBDO
Expanding the frame of reference
Hulley also notes the importance of collaborating with people who have different worldviews to expand the frame of reference. He says, “It’s an intention to not just assume that your experience is the dominant experience or the universal experience. And that takes an act of checking yourself all the time. Am I just writing, creating stuff that is my worldview? Not everybody is walking this life in your shoes. Project yourself into other people’s lives, experiences, thought processes, not to appropriate it, but to try to understand what you don’t understand.”
Lossgott adds, “I think what we can learn from it is to embrace complexity, and that everything doesn’t have to be simple. The other thing is to listen, because your own experience doesn’t reflect everybody else’s experience.”