Billy Keefe's Portfolio

ART + TECH + GENDER Please click on an image to learn more about the project.

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Campaign: #EngineeringIs

To celebrate the new NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering, I created a social media campaign that featured students, professors, industry partners, and public officials answering the question "What is Engineering?" The campaign helped galvanize our internal audience and raised the visibility of engineering at NYU and in NYC. The images have been used in social media, print and digital advertising, event signage and branding, as well as in recruitment materials.

One of the specific challenges of this project was conveying a fair amount of text within Facebook's limits for a promoted post. Facebook breaks images into a 5x4 grid, only 5 of the resulting 20 sectors of an image are allowed to contain text, otherwise your advertisement will be rejected.  See more images >

Roles: Photographer, graphic designer, social media lead. 

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Balloon This performance explored ideas of the body, it's size and how we move in urban spaces. Two balloon belts were constructed from 300 balloons. The performers would attempt to maneuver their environment, perform tasks, and interact with other people, at a markedly larger size, occasionally unsuccessfully in a cacophony of pops. As more balloons popped, the fear of making a spectacle of body size became more pointed for the performers, who had to grapple with the decision between taking up public space and being judged for being large.

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Project x Project Opened December 11, 2013 as a part of Live Nude Tech at the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at NYU.

Project x Project explored the ways people project their gender into the world, as well as onto one another, through the use of custom-made, hand-held projectors and an immersive four-wall video projection running from a MAX MSP Jitter patch. The projectors and an electronic musical instrument were built by hand on set, and then used in the performance.

UPDATE! Project x Project featured in the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering Integrated Digital Media video. Watch it >

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Challenge: BAM.org had outgrown its existing web architecture, ticketing system and CMS. 

Solution: Relaunch BAM.org for BAM's 150th Anniversary to better reflect the institution's new mission of being "The home of adventurous artists, audiences, and ideas." Design a site that leveraged BAM's amazing visual and video assets and could handle thousands of monthly content updates. 

Outcomes: An incredibly visceral celebration of performance. 

Role: Agile Product Owner, UX Lead

I played a key role on the internal BAM digital media team, identifying stakeholder pain points, funnel problems, cart abandonment in the ticketing path, and developing ideas for emphasizing images, videos, and social sharing. Also re-mapped the houses for the introduction of dynamic ticket pricing and new ADA accessibility requirements. Directly managed two employees. Hired a full time videographer to maximize video output and save roughly $100k per year in vendor costs. 

Tools: Proprietary CMS, e-Commerce codebase by POPagency.com, Tessitura CRM, HTML5, CSS, C#, Amazon AWS, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Site Search, Google Data API, Google AdWords, Google Analytics. 

Visit the site: http://www.bam.org

Identifying Pain Points

I conducted dozens of meetings with the employees at BAM.org to identify the technical and business problems they would like resolved during the redesign. I assigned ownership of each problem to the team best equipped to solve it. 

Identifying Problems in the Ticketing Path

I regularly bug tested and beta tested new functionality and code releases for BAM.org. Here are some notes I made when testing different scenarios in our ticketing path. 

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Challenge: Help one of our NYC Public School students, Clevins, a formerly homeless teenager, fulfill a grant he had won to make a documentary about teen homelessness. 

Solution: I helped found the Urban Arts Media Lab and developed a three-week intensive digital filmmaking course. I then recruited students from the over 50 NYC schools Urban Arts teaches in to build a team fifteen students, most of whom had been homeless or were at risk of becoming homeless at the time of the course. After developing a human rights framework for approaching our film, I taught the students basic camera work, producing, audio recording, interviewing, lighting, editing, pitching and writing skills through hands-on lessons while creating the actual film.  

Outcome: A documentary that has been shown at film festivals around the globe and in classrooms all across NYC. School credit for participants. 

Role: Media Lab Director, Teaching Artist, Editor

Tools: Panasonic DVX Camera, Boom Microphone, DV Decks, Final Cut

Week One

Week Two

Week Three

And Beyond!

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Challenge: Build a digital marketing campaign for one of the most adventurous and challenging avant garde performance festivals in the world. 

Solution: A series of video "windows" into nontraditional works of art that are difficult explain with still images. 

Outcome: An iconic Youtube channel, now with over 1 million views, showcasing new and historical works from BAM's stages. 

Role: Producer, Editor

Season Treatment

PROJECT STATEMENT

2011 Next Wave Festival Videos

OVERVIEW

The 31st Next Wave Festival embodies BAM’s long-standing tradition of presenting the world’s foremost innovative live performances. The NWF videos will act as a point of connection between adventurous artist and adventurous audiences.

OPPORTUNITY

Increase audience awareness of and interest in NWF 31’s innovative programming. Document BAM’s history.

EXPLICIT MESSAGING

The NWF is a visceral and intellectual exploration of our collective humanity, experienced through performing & witnessing daring, surprising, honest and transcendent expressions.

IMPLICIT MESSAGING

The viewer will sense that by being a part of NWF they are embarking on an adventure that celebrates our struggle to connect, to grow and, as Ping Chong said of the 2010 NWF, “to be of our own time.”

BUSINESS OBJECTIVES

1. To increase average time on site for NWF PDP pages

2. To increase WOM marketing through social media sharing

3. To increase new visits by getting videos highly indexed in Google/Youtube

CREATIVE OBJECTIVES

1. To clearly convey the visceral nature of each performance through a visual narrative

2. To convey logistical information, the BAM visual identity, and the season identity

3. To create a lasting document of BAM’s programming and artistic values

CHALLENGES

Historically, we have approached the NWF videos as promotional assets on show pages. Our biggest challenge may be in considering the videos in a broader context, as a part of the story of what NWF, BAM and Brooklyn are. This will require us to think of the videos as both a part of the NWF marketing efforts and as stand-alone pieces that can reach audiences beyond the NWF season.

FORMAT

We would like this festival to focus on visual story telling, specifically an implied narrative and story arc.

Where possible would like each piece to contain 2-3 long-ish shots (5 seconds or longer) that capture the spirit of the performance and the festival. We would also like each piece to have an intro, a rising action, a peak and a dénouement.

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Challenge: Create a mobile-optimized version of BAM's flagship website.  Solution: Simplify categories, feature today's performances, drive sales to phone to ensure the most seamless purchasing process.  Outcomes: Positive impact on impulse visits, particularly to movies. Dramatic increase in number of phone numbers in our constituent database.  Role: Agile Product Owner, UX Lead

Working with Personas

To help think through our mobile design, I created BAM's first set of personas. These personas are based on years of audience surveys and linked directly to audience segments our marketing, fundraising, and membership teams already used, allowing for easy institution-wide adoption and fast, meaningful testing. 

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Challenge: Incorporate writing and literacy core competencies into digital media curriculum for a classroom of English as a Second Language and special needs students. Solution: The Family Podcast. I focused our work on audio storytelling, drastically reducing the amount of editing time in comparison with producing video. The smaller learning curve and easier editing process gave us more time to iterate and rewrite stories, edit, and critique.

Outcome: One of my students, Mamadou, a very bright young man who was learning English at the time of this project, really took to writing. He would come in with pages and pages of work each class. Over the course of our time together he went from being a relatively shy kid to presenting his story on stage in front of the entire school. After the class was over, I edited the audio podcast he had created to video files we found together on Youtube.  Role: Teaching artist, Editor

Tools: Garage Band, Final Cut, Vimeo PLEASE BEGIN THIS VIDEO AT THE 3:20 MARK.

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Challenge: Highlight the honorees of the 2013 NYU–Poly Gala. Solution: Create a video tying together the core themes of the honoree's commitment to and experiences of NYU–Poly. Outcomes: A video that has been shared much beyond its intended use. It is shown to major donors when they visit campus, to groups of alumni at networking events around the globe, and to potential corporate and institutional partners.  Role: Writer, Producer, Interviewer, Editor

Tools: Final Cut

2013 NYU–Poly i2e Gala Video from NYU-Poly on Vimeo.

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Challenge: Create a national network television commercial that speaks to an athletics audience, but communicates the academic excellence and college town atmosphere of the University of Kansas.   Solution: The "Great Place to Be" campaign. Shot over three days with more than 100 student extras.  Outcome: A Great Place to Be was adopted as the new university slogan. The video aired regularly on national network television and has inspired an 8 year marketing campaign. The soundtrack became the hold music for the university's telephone system, and is known to thousands of Jayhawks. When the spot ran on the jumbotron during the Orange Bowl, the entire audience rose to its feet and cheered. 

Role: Producer, Director, Editor

Tools: Final Cut, After Effects

Strategy 

Original Storyboards

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Challenge: Communicate the experience of becoming a transgender male.  Solution: A poetry blog that explores the fragmented reality of a gender-nonconforming narrator.  Outcome: I was asked to join Bastard Playground, a writing group based out of the Drama League of New York. 

Role: Writer, Performer

Visit the blog: http://www.asphaltgreen.tumblr.com

Tools: Tumblr

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Problem: Engage incoming Freshman before they arrive on campus.

Solution: What Will You Do? A user-generated content campaign for social media that allows students to introduce themselves to one another by submitting a photo and a short quote starting with the phrase, "I will." Submissions are posted in Facebook groups and the creator is tagged, allowing other students to get to know them. The images are also used to publicly to introduce the incoming class and to create the annual "What Will You Do" video. 

Outcome: This is one of the most engaging social media campaigns at NYU–Poly. It has generated hundreds of submissions, over a thousand comments, and made the first day in a new place more comfortable for two years worth of incoming Freshman. 

Role: Strategy, Social Media, Graphic Design, Video Editing

Tools: Facebook, Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut, After Effects

2013 Images

2013 Engagement Statistics

2012 Video

2012 Engagement (# of Comments)

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Challenge: Fulfill US Department of State grant requirements to produce a multi-lingual, internationally accessible website for the DanceMotion USA program.  Solution: Design a clean, modular site capable of accommodating inline translations (including Asian languages).   Outcome: A site that can be accessed and updated from almost any country in the world and can be translated in most languages. Allowing traveling dance companies to document their experiences and update tour information in real time. 

Role: Agile Product Owner, UX Lead

Tools: Umbraco, HTML 5, Google Webmaster Tools