LIFE ON A KNIFE EDGE

Reports of fatal stabbings have been filling the front pages of UK newspapers recently. Knife crime is on the up and there are growing reports of young people carrying blades for protection. A new campaign from the Home Office, RKCR/Y&R, Guy Manwaring and a group of affected teens hopes to change that.

Sometimes government ads aimed at teenagers can be at best patronising and at worst irrelevant. To ensure that its campaign for the Home Office was appropriate and effective, RKCR/Y&R recruited the best qualified creatives for the job - a group of 18 at-risk teenagers. After working with the group, RKCR/Y&R creatives Nicky Flugge, Freddy Mandy and Tim McNaughton were able to put together some hard-hitting scripts.

According to Flugge, everyone he spoke to on the weekend workshop had first-hand experience of knife crime involving themselves or someone close to them. "Initially they were very suspicious of our motives, pretty much all of them thought it was some sort of PR exercise and it took a while before they begin to open up with ideas for scripts and posters," he said.

They split the young people into groups of three, making six mini-agencies. They then had to pitch their ideas to the creatives. "There were loads of ideas and we sifted through them to find the ones that we thought would work best," said Mandy. "Sometimes an idea could be taken in its original state, as written, and sent straight into production and sometimes we saw the germ of something brilliant in an execution that wasn't quite working and had to polish it ourselves."

From the workshops, the team found that the same misconceptions kept cropping up - for example, that stab wounds to the leg or arm weren't fatal. What struck McNaughton was that those who carried knives didn't set out to kill but didn't appreciate just how dangerous a knife can be

The first spot, How To Treat A Stab Wound, features a medical professor giving a lecture on knife wounds to a group of students. His calm, almost soporific manner is juxtaposed with a series of horrific photographs of real injuries. The second spot, CCTV, shows a brutal stabbing on a busy high street.

For Sonny director Guy Manwaring, the spots were rewarding but challenging - not least because of the week-and-a-half turnaround. He also had to ensure that the spots didn't feel like ads - one had to seem like a camera on a tripod recording a genuine lecture while the other had to feel like a real piece of CCTV footage. "In a way it's a weird one to direct, trying to make it look like there's no production going on" he says.

To ensure as much realism as possible, Manwaring cast a former anthropology lecturer in the role of medical professor and obtained photos of real stab wounds from a paramedic expert. For the CCTV spot, he cleverly made sure that the main action took place just outside of the camera's line of sight. When shooting, Manwaring filmed on a genuine CCTV camera and although they had members of the police on set, several members of the public rang 999, thinking they'd witnessed a real stabbing.

The end results are effective but shocking. Did the creatives ever worry that their spots were going too far? Not according to McNaughton. "To be honest a lot of the ideas that came up from the young people were surprising and challenging, not necessarily what we expected to see. Did we think they were 'too much'? No. Knife crime and knife use is such a serious issue that we always knew from the start that traditional advertising conceits weren't going to be the answer," he said. "To put it simply we found out that there is a huge need to educate some young people about the gruesome realities of carrying a knife. Yes, these images are harrowing, but that's just the reality of knifes."

Click here to view the spot that was Monday's Contender.