Heritage in a digital (podcast) format

Meemoo's GIVE project is a digitisation project that aims to showcase heritage, from glass plates to old newspapers and masterpieces. We devised 'Tot in Detail' - a full marketing campaign with animated videos, longreads and even a narrative podcast!

Podcast
Graphic design and layout

Modern and authentic

Authentic works in a modern setting? That's our thing: we delved into the past, created sparkling branding and developed a complete communication plan. Longread, animation or a narrative, immersive podcast? Tot in Detail has it all!

More than 800,000 newspaper pages, glass plates and masterpieces are on the digital map for the first time thanks to meemoo's GIVE project: a comprehensive digitisation project that gives authentic works a second life. We devised the 'Tot in Detail' campaign to raise awareness of this project through a broad campaign area. In doing so, we stimulated the details and zoomed in on a few masterpieces through a number of expressive content formats: ranging from the 'Aan het Woord' longreads to even an immersive listening story in the Tot in Detail podcast! And, of course, we devised an attractive, visual style that gave authentic works a soft, modern touch!

Four immersive stories

Armed with a bag full of microphones and audio material, our man went all over Flanders to consult heritage experts. The result of these conversations and editing is a gem: four immersive audio stories in Dutch that take you to the Ghent of WWII, only to suddenly descend via old Bruges and the banks of Antwerp to a Mary's procession in Halle. Discover all about the precursor of photography, society in the 19th century, Flanders' extremely political newspapers, the unique animal skins that served as parchment and how people made virtual journeys via special viewing boxes. A true listening tip!

Listen to Tot in Detail (in Dutch) via Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

De Minuut - compact heritage

One of our studio's specialities is animations. For this campaign, we made six different short docu-animations called 'De Minuut'. As with the podcast, we took care of the entire production: from idea over to storyboard, script, animation and even recording our own voice-over!

As inspiration, we used heritage objects such as newspapers, glass plates and masterpieces, as well as various paintings and other elements. The animations themselves have the look of authentic etchings: line styles in black and white with shaded patterns. In terms of colour palette, each animation is also built with the tertiary variant of the corporate identity of Tot In Detail: very soft yet contrasting enough with the black-and-white line styles.

The result? Six visually appealing and content-rich animations that teach you in a unique way and at lightning speed a lot about:

  • the immense benefits of digitisation,
  • how gigapixel photography makes for a zoomable high-resolution photograph,
  • the technology behind character recognition or OCR,
  • what people used to do with a magic lantern,
  • the world of manuscripts and copyists,
  • how facial recognition and metadata make the rich archives searchable.

Modern interpretations of heritage

The GIVE project serves not only to make archives more searchable or to highlight old works. At the same time, it also aims to encourage reuse of authentic pieces.

We demonstrated this by collaborating with spoken word artist Loeke Vanhoutteghem and visual artists Jasper Van Gestel and Pol Cosmo. Loeke created a beautiful piece of spoken word, while Jasper Van Gestel and Pol Cosmo indulged in some elements from self-selected masterpieces. Van Gestel's work can serve perfectly as a tattoo, not entirely coincidentally also one of his specialities. Pol Cosmo's creation, in turn, transforms a once-dull black-and-white print of pious nuns into a more inclusive work with an ultra-modern wink, thanks to some rainbow colours.

We also let the very young among us make their reinterpretations. At several schools in Flanders, children made postcards which we exhibited at the launch event of this campaign, organised by meemoo in Brussels.

Online campaign with historic content?