Crissy Bogusz – film winner #instapoetrylib competition at the National Poetry Library

Who is Crissy Bogusz?
Crissy Bogusz created one of the winning films of the #instapoetrylib competition at the National Poetry Library. Crissy is a designer, motion graphics artist and video editor currently working at Vogue International, creating the animated videos for their Snapchat Discover videos. Her creation of the animation for NHS Crisis, one of the winners of the National Poetry Library’s #onstapoetrylib competition came about through a creative collaboration between her and two spoken word artists. Olmo Lazarus and Thomas ‘GhettoGeek’ Owoo are two well-established spoken word artists, known well on the poetry scene and also dedicate their lives to using their skills within poetry to help reach the youth of today through schools and councils around the country. Thomas has just given a TedTalk speech on this subject:

(http://www.tedxhounslowed.co.uk/). He uses spoken word as a tool to engage the disaffected youth of today in education, and he also uses it as an example to help teachers better relate to their pupils.

So what else is there to know about Crissy Boguz?

“I also work as a mentor to young girls in need of inspiration from successful women around the country via The Girls Network. So between the collaborators there is definitely a passion to educate through our skills, especially our skills within the arts. That being spoken word for Olmo and Thomas, and multimedia design and animation for myself. Thomas and Olmo spent the better part of 2 years working on this particular spoken word piece about the woes of the NHS (inspired by their family members who work within it). They dedicated themselves to finding a creative way to get this message out to the public.”

(Olmo’s journey is noted in his online article HERE

The spoken word duo then approached Crissy due to the popularity and innovative design of her videos created for Vogue to bring this piece to life. The animation took many months due to every second being depicted by visuals : designs, fluid typography, dynamic animation and accompanying audio. Each sentence had multiple meanings so her task was to decipher how to best represent these visually.

On it’s release in Jan 2018, the general public including well-known figures and groups took to sharing it and it garnered great praise. Among it’s supporters were political figure Peter Stefanovic, medical expert Dr Lauren Gavaghan, and groups such as Occupy London. The animation won in the film category of the National Poetry Library’s #instapoetrylib competition and is now being exhibited at The Southbank Centre and Royal Festival Hall at the world’s first instagram poetry exhibition.

“It’s interesting to not the link with the prominence now being given to art via social media. Apps that were once used to help us communicate with our loved ones, are now being utlisied as a communication tool to spread important social messages and credible works of art. The competition and exhibition itself attests to that, but it can also be seen in my work work at Vogue. Huge prestige is now given to the videos I create for British Vogue and Vogue Paris’ Snapchat Discover channels, we are continually breaking records in the amount of views, screenshots, shares and Vogue subscribers reached each month and animated video snaps are used to help Vogue cover some of the biggest world wide events, such as the recent Royal Wedding.”

Other winners include Holly Mc Nish, Stephen Triplet, Saebom Kim.