Ricoh is a popular brand among people who enjoy taking photos and have a creative mind. However, the penetration of smartphones had made their interest for digital camera low. To break this, we showed customers a new way of enjoying photos: 'making art with photos'.

People with creative minds tend to have a self-promotional mind. We could encourage word-of-mouth promotion on the web, if we made a place to create and exhibit their art.The website shows crafts with photos, something which was never seen before.The concept is 'Photo Animation × Canvas'.We focused on one of the remarkable functions of the camera: photo animation.We made a system for creating photo animations whereby the client uploaded multiple photos to the website. We named this photo animation 'fotocoma'.To fuel their creative minds more, we made 500×500-cells-sized 'Big Canvases' where users could put their fotocomas up, like a big tapestry.At the start, to show off the new way of enjoying photos, we put sample fotocoma's up, using the camera's zoom function.Media and blogs picked up the site and brought creative users to the site to create their fotocomas. Because these creators promoted their photo animation by using both/either the built-in twitter function and/or their blogs, new users came to make their own fotocomas.

The result was that 46,000 people visited and recorded 400,000 views.

The site was open from March 2nd to August 31st, 2011. We offered a website that shows art with photos, something which was never seen before. Promotions were on from the opening of the site.Media and blogs picked up the site and brought creative users to create their photo animation. Because these creators promoted their photo animation by using both/either the built-in twitter function and/or their blogs, new users came to create their own photo animation.

As a result, on the website there were 1,301 photo animations with 30,000 photos, and 46,000 people who visited and recorded 400,000 views.