Inside the campaign helping Ukrainians to ‘backup’ their cultural heritage

Plenty of agencies talk about changing the world through creativity, notes Morten Grubak, Virtue’s Global Executive Creative Director, and a man with plenty of socially minded campaigns to his name. “I think I haven’t really felt it in my work for years,” he concedes, speaking to D&AD from his office in Copenhagen. “But this project really shows that it’s not just something a creative agency can talk about — we really can do it.” The project in question is Backup Ukraine: a historic effort to use cutting-edge 3D-scanning technology in order to preserve, and one day restore, the priceless artefacts of the nation which is currently at war.

Grubak and his team at Virtue led the efforts in partnership with software developers Polycam, world heritage body UNESCO, the heritage preservation charity Blue Shield, and United24 — President Zelenskyy’s fundraising platform for the Russo-Ukrainian war. It is, in essence, an invitation to all Ukrainians to scan the world around them from their smartphones to document what they have lost and what they still have: from cathedrals and tower blocks, to centuries-old artefacts and murals, to tattered shoes and broken cabinets. The project has earned ten D&AD Pencils, much to Grubak’s delight. “Normally you’re lucky to get one or two,” he says. “They’re the toughest to get. So it’s really outstanding to have done so well.”

The awards are a vindication for what has been a frenetic few years of work for all involved, from the very moment that Russian tanks first surged toward Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia. “We were all pretty impacted by that February 24th last year,” Grubak says. “And so as an organisation, the first thing we wondered was, what can we do? So we brainstormed.” At the time, Virtue had been playing around with Polycam’s 3D scanning app for other campaigns, as part of a wider foray into mixed reality devices and gaming software like Unreal Engine.

But in those early brainstorms, Grubak recalls, the images that really galvanised his team were the sights of Ukrainian statues being wrapped up and camouflaged by Russian forces in eastern Ukraine. “Those statues looked like they’d been buried standing up, body-bagged like corpses,” he says. “And we saw a quote from someone at Blue Shield saying that the quickest way to raze a nation is by destroying its history.” The idea began to form — to catalogue and preserve Ukrainian landmarks so that, if they were to be destroyed, a blueprint would exist for their repair.

Grubak felt that the campaign needed a credible voice to give it more impetus, and so he reached out to the “perfect partner” — UNESCO. “Normally it takes six to 12 months to get UNESCO on board for something,” he tells us. “We got them on board in ten days.” Next, they needed more licences for the Polycam software, as each licence cost around $80 a year, and volunteers on the ground in Ukraine would need to be able to get scanning with minimum fuss. “We didn’t even have a contact for them, so we reached out to them totally cold.” Grubak remembers asking for 50 free licences. “And they said, ‘You know what, why don’t we make it free for everyone in Ukraine?’”

This move dramatically enhanced the scale of possibilities at hand for Backup Ukraine. Initial plans to source a small cadre of cataloguers became a project to empower every single Ukrainian to preserve their homeland’s history. And with that scaling up came another challenge. “Polycam was iOS. And of course,” Grubak laughs, “all of Europe is Android. Oh, great!” Thankfully, Polycam were just as committed to the project as Virtue, and set about with a sprint and a hackathon to switch their software into a multi-platform app that could work on just about every smartphone in Ukraine. “Within weeks,” Grubak says, “Polycam went from zero to 70,000 downloads. It really caught on.”

As the project’s popularity shot through the roof, the Backup Ukraine team found themselves inundated by the sheer volume of data now being scanned and catalogued by app users. On a practical level alone, it was mind-boggling — they needed data space to store all of these scans, and they needed to ensure its safety. “People were scanning everything, literally everything,” Grubak tells us. “Their pets, their chairs, their girlfriends. So we needed to make sure that they weren’t actually putting the country at risk by giving away locations.” In partnership with Zelenskyy’s closest confidantes, Backup Ukraine ensured that geodata would be secured and anonymised — and scanners were reminded by the government not to scan anything that could be sensitive to national security, like military bases or army equipment.

Once the initial rush of enthusiasm settled, and the project slotted into a manageable workflow, the question arose of just what to do with the growing library. Step one, collation, was taking care of itself, so Grubak and his team looked to the wider world, where these scans could be used to bring the war closer to home for millions, through augmented reality. “If you’re a teacher, you can show students right up close the impact of the war, right there in the classroom on an iPad,” he says. “We’re advocates of a three dimensional experience, so that people can understand the horror of what’s going on in Ukraine right now.”

The grandest aim of the project is to use these scans as the blueprint for Ukraine’s future reconstruction, once the war is over. “We’re working with multiple 3D printers now to try and recreate some of the artefacts that have already been lost in the war,” Grubak says, “and other volunteers, with serious VFX experience, are helping us clean up the scans to a professional grade so that every scan is as polished and perfect as possible.”

The aim, eventually, is to shed the name Backup Ukraine, and become ‘Buildup Ukraine’ — an organisation committed to restoring the country as best as it can, while using the data to present the scale of the nation’s losses to international courts. For Grubak, and for Virtue, this has been a far cry from campaigns past; campaigns that have been innovative and fun. It has been exhausting, he admits. “I might not have another one of these campaigns in me.” But 18 months in, he has never been more creatively fulfilled, and hopes that others can take heed of what Backup Ukraine has achieved. “When the world is burning,” he says, “you are capable of doing much more than you think.”