BP’s brief was to create a long-form film for broadcast about artists and their sitters from the last 30 years of the BP Portrait Award. Central to this was their request for us to find characters who would capture the emotion and spirit of the competition. In addition to the full-length, the commission included short edits which were used to promote the film.

Creating an editorial sponsored documentary was chosen for this project in order to best communicate the emotion and spirit of the competition. The BP Portrait Award showcases amazing art and artists, the film’s ambition was to seamlessly align with this, revealing a deeper layer of meaning behind the paintings, their artists and sitters. Like the award the film is not about the brand, it is about art.

We carried out in depth research to find strong contributors from past competitions as well as those going through the 2019 judging. By weaving these two sides together; the old and the new, the film moves from the poignant and retrospective to the hopeful and expectant. Intimate interviews tease out the emotion that binds these stories together and makes up the fabric of the competition itself.

We specialise in emotive storytelling, capturing personal testimony from carefully selected contributors. Intimacy was at the heart of our creative approach, using small filming crews, a relaxed conversational interview style and poetic cinematography. There is purposefully no presenter or narrator to allow for an uninterrupted connection between viewer and contributor, leaving room for emotion to build and resonate with our audience.

We knew broadcast success would come from engaging a broadcaster upfront to allow for necessary editorial control over the project. Lonelyleap brokered a partnership with BBC World News and commissioning editor Emma De’Ath. This international audience was a great fit for the project as a platform for celebrating the work from the BP Portrait Award over the last 30 years.

Working in true partnership with BBC ensured both a smooth creative process and enabled the development of a highly efficient distribution plan for the film and its supporting assets to a defined BP audience on the Arts section of BBC.com, putting it in front of the right people, at the right time, in the right place.

The film was broadcast globally on BBC World News during the summer of 2019 and is currently live on Amazon Prime. The film has reached an audience of 1.5 million (and counting).

Research showed that the programme drove an increase in key perceptions about Art, particularly the importance of sharing the stories of artists and resulted in 94% positive sentiment amongst BBC viewers, along with a 39% increase in brand affinity.

Employee engagement with the film remains very strong. After a screening for staff and friends of BP at the NPG, BP are now in the middle of a screening tour at BP’s UK offices to show the film to their 16,000 UK employees.