The “Broken Souls” campaign, designed for the Great War Museum of the Pays de Meaux, received a Wood Pencil (bronze), a particularly rare award in the world of advertising creation and design.
Created in London in 1962, D&AD is considered one of the most demanding creative festivals in the world. The organization itself describes its awards as deliberately difficult to earn. The Amiens Julien Beuvry is one of the creatives of the BBDO Paris agency as senior artistic director with Sonia Dos Santos, and Benoit Oulhen, both designer-editors, who have succeeded in offering a sensitive immersion in the psychological impact of the conflict of the Great War.
Impactful visuals
From archive images representing soldiers suffering from mental disorders, they were able to create strong symbolic visuals which were worked directly on the photographic support, which these creatives cut out, dissolved and eroded. HAS”It is always an honor and a pleasure to receive an award for a project. Even more so when it is a project in which we have invested a lot personally. In terms of processing and renderings, there was also a lot of research with a printer, we spent a little time to choose the right papers, the right printing profiles according to the reactions we wanted to have, in particular in relation to the solvent, to have the right paper, so that the ink comes off» confides Julien Beuvry.
The forty-year-old has never left Amiens, the city of his heart. After studying accounting, he chose marketing and visual communication. A successful bet, he is today artistic director at BBDO Paris, where he has signed several award-winning campaigns at international festivals.
Immersion sensibleÂ
This campaign is based on a series of artisanal and experimental posters created from real archive photographs deliberately altered: prints repeated 1,916 times to form a trench, portraits degraded by solvents or left several days in a real trench in order to visually materialize the psychological suffering of the soldiers. But also mini documentaries and a film. HAS”To have this mechanism of reproducing what 24 hours of non-stop bombardment could represent for mental health, we had this idea of installation to generate this visual. There is also all this work behind the scenes, the cutting workshops, access to a zenith, to be able to shoot the images. For the music for the interviews and also for the film which will be released soon, we had a soundtrack by a well-known composer, the composer of the film The West, Nothing New, which is on Netflix and which won an Oscar. It allowed us to use these compositions for this content» adds Julien Beuvry who is also vice-president of Amiens SC Judo, administrator of Synapse 3i and speaker at SUP de Com Amiens. He also received a very nice Amiens Success Profile at the end of 2025.
