The ask
Create a campaign promoting the Rhode Island School of Design’s (RISD) Pre-College, a 6-week summer program that serves as a test-run for prospective art students to see if art school is for them.


Creative insight
Art kids aren’t the same as other kids. They just aren’t. They don’t dress the same, think the same, or see the world the same. But once they get to art school, they finally meet hundreds of other people who are exactly the same as them: not the same. And it unleashes something within them they didn’t know they had.


Campaign idea
Never be the same again


Activating the idea
Highlight the transformation that happens at RISD Pre-College.


Manifesto
You’re different. You see the world through a unique set of eyes. That is to say, you agree with Rauschenberg: “There is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting.”

You can’t help it. You’ve loved art since you were a little kid. You couldn’t care less about it’s perceived impracticality. You ignore your dad when you hear him say, “it’s just a phase.”

Your friends don’t get it, either. They don’t understand why you’d want to waste your summer vacation at art camp.

But you know better. You know this. Is not. Art camp.

There are no counselors. No crafts, campfires or kum-by-yahs.

Here, there are only day-long studio classes, intense critiques, and grueling final projects. For six weeks you’ll live like an art student. Dorm in the dorms, dine in the dining hall, study in the studio. This is your chance to find out if art school is for you. To find out what you’re made of. To live in a world that you design.

You’ll work tirelessly, and create wildly, alongside hundreds of other people from all over the world who are exactly like you: they’re different, too.

Get ready. Because you’ll never be the same again.

RISD Pre-College


Creative approach
Document the entire experience of a diverse group of three students — from flights in to final crits, intercutting between their incredibly different lives, experiences, artistic mediums and creative points of view, painting as clear a picture of the program as possible… set to a moving score that at first, communicates apprehension, then slowly grows into confidence and resolve.


60-sec OLV: “Never be the same again.”
[VO, Steve Jobs, from a 2011 interview]

[Visually intercut between 3 different student stories, each as they do things in parallel: get off a plane, grab their luggage, drive to RISD, arrive at the dorm, meet a roommate, unpack their art supplies, apprehensively attend their first class, and so on.]

When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. But that's… that’s a very limited life.

[Continue to intercut between the 3 student stories, each as they start to find themselves, discover their own visual point of view through their work, stay up late building, tinkering, toying, fixing, erasing, painting, spilling, tearing...]

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: and that is, everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you.

[Music swells to reveal the students presenting their work during final critiques in front of the class.]

And you can change it.
You can influence it.
Improve it.
Make your mark upon it.

[Close on shots of RISD Pre-College graduates who have gone on to do remarkable things — work at Pixar, and NASA, design remarkable places and spaces — their names and contributions listed as lower-thirds.]

Once you learn that,
you'll never be the same again.

[GFX] RISD Pre-College


Art Direction
Mood board photos and footage by Joe Tornio