Bedford Girls’ School film
In Our Words
School promotional film
Bedford Girls’ School were looking for a brand video that would help them stand out from other independent schools in the area.
Working with design company Firebrand Creative, and the BGS marketing team, we came up with the concept for an authentic, honest film, told through the eyes of the students.
No actors, no scripts, just the genuine words from the girls themselves.
Client
Bedford Girls' School
How we created the film
We presented the client with a treatment that outlined the idea, style of footage and tone of the film so that we were all aligned on the approach. The next few months were spent auditioning students to see who would work best on camera, visiting the school to research the best locations for filming and planning how to get the most out of our four shoot days. With so much to fit in everything needed to be carefully scheduled to make sure we had the right areas and students free at the right time.
With one month to go we finalised the crew and lighting/camera rentals, honed the interview questions for the students and locked in the schedule.
We broke the shoot down into two, two-day sessions. The first would be interview based and the second more b-roll based. We allowed a fortnight in between the sessions to give us time to produce a rough cut of the interviews and make sure we had everything we needed to tell the story of the school. The second session was then all about getting the beautiful shots for the b-roll that would illustrate the wonderful words uttered by the students.
Both sets of shoot days went brilliantly and we ended up with way more footage than we could ever use, which was great as it gave us plenty of options in the edit. This also gave us the opportunity to make the clients budget go further by producing four additional short social edits that focused on particular themes, as well as the main film itself.
All post production was done in-house by Novo Studios and the final film was released in January 2024 and received a fantastic reaction from the clients, school governors and parents alike. The video has racked up over 30,000 views (at the time of posting this) and has generated huge interest for the school.
As well as the main film we also supplied various shorter edits in different shapes and sizes to work across the schools social media, helping to ensure that BGS got the most out of all the wonderful footage we shot.
Behind the scenes
To get the best out of the client's budget we kept the crew very small. This meant everyone was pitching in to help lug kit from location to location.
We used the Canon C500 MKII as our A-Cam and an Canon R5C as our B-Cam and on the gimbal. They cut together really well in the edit. Lenses were all Canon cine primes with a the RF 24-70mm, or EF 70-200mm on the B-cam.
Lighting was a mix of Prolycht 675s, a 300 FS and several old Arri 2Ks. I think we added in an Aladdin 1×1 mat for some fill on one scene too.
Credits
Director/DP – Oliver Suckling
1st AC – Alan Moran
Assistant/Sound – Denny Wright