We were commissioned to bring to life a cover story about how Facebook and Google consistently stop all attempts to regulate them. To illustrate this aggressive political lobbying dynamic, the idea was to have a Facebook hand pinning down a diminished, powerless regulator, literally stuck under the large thumb.

The idea for the look & feel was to use the iconing thumb-up Facebook hand upside down as a “flat” digital object interacting with the defeated protagonist as a realistic scene, set in a tangible, dimensional environment. We photographed a model in a formal attire styled to match the graphics colourway, in a position simulating being pushed against the ground from the back, messing up the clothes and using chunky props to cast our shadows on the floored politician. We then played with the scale of the hand in our composition to convey a sense of heavy weight & total dominance.