PROJECT FOCUS: Gloucestershire College

17th November 2020 Uncategorised

THE IDEA

We were contacted by Gloucestershire College with a very targeted aim in mind, to create a series of videos to showcase the incredible facilities that the 3 campuses (Gloucester, Cheltenham and Cinderford) offer to their students.

Although we knew this would take a fair amount of filming of the facilities themselves, we felt a hook / theme / mechanic was needed to help bind the wider theme together.

It’s not only about the facilities but what they, combined with the teaching staff, allow every young person coming through their doors the opportunity to achieve.

To this end, we felt a scripted piece was the right way to go, and letting the students at the college voice this script, no actors, no professional voiceover. The script would be one piece of dialogue passed between the various students, mixing in footage of them using the facilities in the course of their ongoing college experience, then splicing in small pieces to camera that helped move the film forward.

The script was written by one of the colleges other partners, Mighty Communications, who we worked with before and knew they would be able to deliver exactly what this film needed.


THE PLAN

As this was the first piece of work we had been asked to do for the college, we needed to get a good understanding of what the facilities were and come up with some creative ideas and situations to film. A day was spent between the campuses identifying interesting activities which made use of the wide variety of equipment that’s available to the students, planning the activities, who needed to be involved, resulting in a full schedule being created to capture all the content.


THE STYLE

Working with some very talented people, our aim was to make a film that felt authentic, not overly produced and not forced, but shot in a cinematic way. Each area of the campus held courses that had their own pace but it was important to ensure everything felt dynamic, be this through camera movement, lighting or situation.


IN PRODUCTION

We had 4.5 days spread between the three campuses, capturing the activities, working with the students and staff to make sure the right stuff ended up on the drives for the edit.

We were lucky enough to get permissions to fly the drone that gave the larger perspective on how large each campus was.

One thing that the crew mused upon during the shoot was just how brilliant all the students were, being patient and enthusiastic in a production situation, which sometimes people can understandably struggle with.

All in all this was a great project to be tasked with and thanks must go to the support staff that helped us along the way. We are very much looking forward to the next time that phone rings and we can saddle up for the next challenge with them.


THE RESULTS