Lenovo collaborated with seven creators on a huge global art project—using a single laptop

Where do artists get their inspiration? That’s the question at the heart of Lenovo’s latest creator marketing campaign, in which one of its laptops changes hands among seven artists around the globe to create a continuous chain of video content. The “Creator Odyssey” campaign kicked off in late October with a nine-minute YouTube video from Mexican creator Gawx Art, who laid the foundation for the video series by calling up the other six artists involved in the project and producing a digital sketch depicting “the artist brain” on one of Lenovo’s “Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition” laptops. Gawx then shipped that laptop to the next creator in the chain, Belgian artist Vexx, who used Gawx’s sketch as the starting point for his own piece of art: a painting on a patchwork denim canvas. A post shared by Gawx Art (@gawx_art) “[Lenovo’s] idea of sending the laptop around was very easy,” Gawx told Ad Age. “But we needed a motive to do that. And the topic of inspiration is always so abstract, so I thought this was an opportunity to research and to use it as an experiment, almost.” Portal A, a social content company that has worked with Lenovo for nearly a decade, developed the campaign concept. The laptop continued its journey from creator to creator, each taking inspiration from the previous piece of art and leveraging their own area of artistic expertise, from CGI to digital art, to produce the next creation in the series. Other artists involved in the campaign include Japanese photographer and videographer Gaku Lange; Norwegian VFX artist Maria Kallevik; and Indian filmmaker Raghav Anil Kumar (aka “Shutter Authority”), who leveraged CGI and other visual effects to replicate surreal dreams he’s experienced. A post shared by Maria Kallevik † (@maria.kallevik) With its campaign, Lenovo sought to showcase how its Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition laptop isn’t “just a tool for individual expression, but a catalyst for collective creativity” and that “the process of creating art is as interesting as the resulting artwork itself,” said Archit Mardia, global brand strategy lead at Lenovo. The laptop returned to Gawx’s hands after its international journey for him to produce a final video inspired by his peers’ artwork—a 14-minute short film titled “Anatomy of the Artist Brain.” Throughout the campaign, a Portal A production team also followed the Lenovo laptop around the globe to interview each creator and capture behind-the-scenes content of their artistic processes. Lenovo uploaded the resulting mini-documentary to its YouTube channel earlier this month. Since October, when Gawx initiated the “Creator Odyssey,” the campaign has collectively amassed over 13 million views and more than 700,000 likes, comments and other engagements across over 100 pieces of content, according to Lenovo. That’s “twice as much content as originally agreed upon, demonstrating their buy-in and strong resonance with the campaign,” Mardia said. “I think [brands] have realized that some creators are capable of creating videos that look very close to what a production team would make, but with a special essence that I feel is … difficult to get from a production team,” Gawx added. More Creativity coverage from Ad Age: Sign up for our daily Creativity newsletter to see the best stories of the day.

Lenovo collaborated with seven creators on a huge global art project—using a single laptop

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