A SOLIHULL film-maker proved her company’s campaign was a cut above the rest when she was handed a top film award.
Sam Taylor and her Digbeth-based team at Tinker Taylor won the Best Digital Innovation/Digital Creativity Award at the Royal Television Society Award for its #WeAreYou campaign commissioned by the Police Federation for Northern Ireland (PFNI).
The campaign was designed to bring the public and police closer together and saw Tinker Taylor working with BAFTA award-winning producer Brian J Falconer and crew from smash-hit drama Game of Thrones.
They produced a series of three 60 to 90-second videos aimed at showing the juxtaposition between the ‘normal’ and working lives of police officers in Northern Ireland.
In one of the videos, the camera shows a uniformed officer searching what appears to be a squalid drugs den and reveals his emotional reaction as he discovers the lifeless body of a child in a bath.
Meanwhile, the camera pans between his life as a police officer to his life as a father to a young child.
The campaign reached a fifth of Northern Ireland’s population in just four weeks as it went viral, being shared across a number of digital platforms including Twitter and Facebook, throughout Northern Ireland, the UK and in countries across the globe – gaining significant traction in the USA.
Shot in Greater Belfast over three days last December, the campaign was launched at Long Gallery in Stormont’s Parliament Buildings earlier this year.
Sam, Creative Director and Founder of Tinker Taylor, said: “We are beyond thrilled that we have won this award.
“This project was a real labour of love and is very dear to our hearts – the award is the icing on the cake.
“We wanted to raise awareness of the difficult job police officers do on a day-to-day basis and we are delighted that we were successful in achieving what we set out to do.
“With 100 years of political history to contend with, we utilised the concept of family to unite and connect with the public.
“Officers are often attacked, insulted, threatened and criticised. Their uniform may be intimidating to some, but the men and women wearing it are just people.
“We wanted to convey that as parents, husbands, wives, sons and daughters, they share the same hopes and fears as everyone else.”
