SCABs

5 steps to win at D&AD*. By @Edwards92Sophie

By Sophie Edwards

 

5 steps to win at D&AD*.

 

*Doing these things won’t mean you will 100% win a D&AD New Blood pencil. But they will improve your chances (hopefully). They should help you enter the best work you can in the month we have till deadline day.

 

How do I know this? Well, today we had a masterclass about how to master D&AD – here’s what we learnt:

 

  1. Answer the brief in an unexpected way
But don’t stop there! Up to 1,000 people enter each brief. And as ever, some categories will be more popular than others. So the probability is someone else will have the same idea as you, even if it’s great, unexpected, surprising and groundbreaking. How will you make yours stand out?

 

Fill in the gaps. Every single one. Have you thought about how you can touch every part of your audience’s lives? How will you tell the story? Your idea must be done better than the identical one in the category. Push it as far as you can and only keep in the best of the best uses of media.

 

  1. Incredible craft in every frame of your video

 

Yes, really. Every single second of your video has to be there for a reason. Put care into every ounce. Get your script written. Watch the winning entries from last year. How can yours be different?  Think about how your video looks – what typeface are you using? Voice over? Music? What will you do to make it pop out from the 1,000 other videos answering the same brief?

 

  1. Tell a story in an engaging way

 

Take the judges on a great journey. Captivate them from the start, the first frame, the first sentence must be so juicy that they can’t skip your video. But you can’t open with a bang and then fizzle out. It must get better. More enjoyable. With an ending even more memorable than the start.  It must be so unexpected that the judges want to watch it again.

 

  1. Hook them in and leave them desperate for more

 

TAD DAH! SURPRISE. The best way to get people engaged with your idea is to surprise them. Take them on twists and turns. Dazzle them. To do this you must 6 hat (plenty of SCABs on this if you want to know how to) your idea everyday. How can you improve it? How does your gut feel about it? Do you get bored at any point during your video? Do your friends want to watch it more than once? Does it make you laugh? Cry? Think? Yawn?

 

  1. Schedule

 

Plan. Plan. Plan. Plan. And plan. Plan to submit your entry a day earlier – because on 22nd March everyone will be uploading at the same time. No one wants to miss the deadline due to the website crashing. Set yourself deadlines for everything. If you finish your work early – have a go at another brief.

 

And finally,

 

6. Good luck 🙂

Related SCABs

Go back

Student Application

  • Fill out the Application Form below to be a part of our next Award-Winning intake.

  • MM slash DD slash YYYY
image