A digital award ceremony for the best journalism of the year.
European Press Prize
Skills involved
Visual Design, Motion Design, Video Production, Podcasting
The 2020 Drumscroll was highly praised by the laureates, nominees, jury members, and the event organisers themselves.
European Press Prize
The Challenge
Every year, a jury of acclaimed editors and media experts gathers in offices in London, Amsterdam and Budapest to select the best European journalism of the year across four categories: investigative reporting, distinguished reporting, opinion writing, and innovation.
Once the winners have been picked, there is an annual award ceremony attended by journalists and media organisations from across the entire continent. It’s a celebration of the power of a free and independent press, and an homage to the reporters who protect our democracies from those who benefit from spreading lies.
But, in 2020, in the midst of the unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic, a physical award ceremony was naturally out of the question. So the European Press Prize approached Awe Studio with a daunting challenge: to create a storytelling experience that would do justice to the power and prestige of the award ceremony. This resulted in the production of video-testimonies of the winners, audio fragments, and stunning visuals for the “Drumscroll”.
An immersive multimedia journey
What makes this project so special—and all the more complex—is the incredible amount of different media formats being combined. For instance, we interviewed the winning journalists in each of the four countries where they were based (Georgia, Romania, Norway and Slovakia) and created these amazing “visual podcasts” that combine sound with animated illustrations. We applied the same format to the stories themselves—for instance, watch how Isobel Cockerel’s article on the Uyghur women fighting China’s surveillance state comes alive in this “animated article video”.
Our editors applied design thinking techniques to storytelling to create the smoothest possible narrative experience. Last but not least, we worked with a chamber music ensemble based in Dublin to compose custom music for each of the winning videos.
Impact
While digital experiences will never replace the power of offline meetups, the 2020 Drumscroll experience surpassed even the highest expectations. Its clever use of multimedia formats and its user-friendly design helped the European Press Prize host an amazing digital award ceremony—one that will not be forgotten any time soon.
The Drumscroll — European Press Prize
