Four artists, four talents, one creative collaboration

Social media has turned us all into content creators, so how do you elevate your video clips and posts to ensure they stand out from the crowd? Canon's Crew Create campaign brought together four UK-based artists, who all use a range of Canon cameras and lenses to create their social posts and videos, to demonstrate what's possible – whatever your budget or skill set.

Football freestyler Ewan Baggott, aka EABskills, has been a keen photographer since childhood and uses the flagship Canon EOS R6 to film skills and tricks for his 107k Instagram followers. "I was obsessed with photography when I was younger," he says. "Having the best image quality is paramount for what I do."

Brit Award-winning musician and producer Jack Garratt uses a Canon EOS RP to document his creative process and share photos of life on the road with his 90.9k Instagram followers. "I love taking photographs," he says. "When I'm out on the road, I always have a camera with me."

Dancer Nifè has more than 1.5 million followers on TikTok. She uses a Canon EOS M50 Mark II to video her dance challenges and tutorials. "It's lightweight, easy to use and I can just put it in my bag," she says.

Street artist Fat Cap Sprays likes to keep a low profile, so he films his short-form process videos, which have earned him more than 72 million TikTok likes, with a Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III. "It's really compact and really light, which is perfect as I'm holding a spray can in my other hand," he says.

Here we meet the four artists, find out a bit more about their creative process and discover what they learned from coming together to collaborate on a short movie showcasing their skills.

Read more:

• Six expert tips and techniques for making your social media content stand out from the crowd.
• The cameras and lenses content creators use to elevate their work.

"When I was younger, I was obsessed with football, and I was also obsessed with photography," says Ewan. "I thought, 'How can I combine football and cameras?'"

Ewan started filming tricks and skills and sharing them online, and now posts his football-themed montages to TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. "I love the ability to be free and do whatever I want," he says.

"The collaboration was a really cool opportunity for different creators to come together and take different aspects of each other's work," he adds. "We had a call beforehand to bounce ideas off each other. I was listening to [the music] Jack had created and thinking, 'I need to do a freestyle skill on this drop or on this beat.'

"There were definitely a few things I was worried about on the day. I was worried about dropping the ball, and about spatial awareness. I needed to work out my space, the four walls that I had, and to make sure that when the ball came towards me I didn't hit the camera!"

"It's important to work with other people because everyone's different. You can take a little bit from here and a little bit from there. The biggest thing is always learning. If you're working with someone else, you're learning from them and they're learning from you."

Jack has always been passionate about music. "The thing I always wanted to put all of my heart into was writing and performing," he says. "The first song I wrote was when I was maybe 13 or 14 – it was always something that I found myself doing quite naturally."

He believes social media has encouraged him to be both a better photographer and a better performer, but he's selective about what he posts online. "I kind of pick and choose the moments when I want to bring people in. Sometimes I loop a pattern round on a song I might be working on, and I'll play some chords or a bassline over the top of it. Sometimes I'll just sit down with a guitar and mumble through a song I've started writing."

He was keen to see how his music would be interpreted by the other artists on the day – and to ensure that it matched the energy of their performances. "I wanted to make sure that what I was playing mirrored what everyone else was doing. I loved the opportunity to kind of mirror and match other people's energy.

"It was an amazing experience seeing the music represented in other people's art. A really fascinating part of creating anything is seeing how other people interpret it."

Nifè has been dancing all her life. "My mom would say that I was dancing when I came out of the womb," she says. "I was really shy when I was younger. Dance was the one thing that gave me confidence. Even now, I think I'm only confident because of what I've learned from dancing. I've learned how to present myself, how to move, how to be comfortable in my body and in who I am."

Nifè was tasked with creating a dance routine for the video, but she was keen to leave some space in her choreography so she could freestyle on the day.

"I knew that when I got into the space, there was something I was going to be able to work with," she says.

"The music [for the collaboration] wasn't typically what I'd choose, but I got to see what part of me would do something different. I got to see how other people work with something. You need to interact with other creators to learn more, to bounce off of each other, to give each other advice. I was worried about being nervous. Nerves can be very annoying, but they're there nonetheless. I was also worried about anything going wrong, spacing wise. I had to work a little bit harder with this one. I needed to be a bit smarter."

"When people see a piece of art, they only see the end result, but by filming it, I'm showing the process – how it all comes together, layer by layer," says street artist Fat Cap Sprays. "I also get to show everyone the satisfaction I get when I paint. It's powerful to share creativity. It brings happiness to people's lives."

Fat Cap Sprays was tasked with creating the background art for the video. He designed an owl in neon red to 'pop' off the black background. "Owls have the best eyesight, and they're creatures of the night, so I wanted the eyes to be like the lenses of the camera – the eyes on the content creators," he says.

"My part was very different from the other performers. If I messed it up, I could paint it again and keep tweaking and adapting it until I was happy. There was a lot more pressure on the other content creators because they had to perform with the camera on them and do it over and over again until they got it right.

"Coming together enabled us to create something different that no one's seen before. It's about bouncing off each other to create something special. We all have different talents, but we can all make content together in an entertaining way."

See what happened when these top creators pooled their creative talents in this great collaboration piece:

Written by Andrea Ball