The Brief

Moray’s Health and Social Care board invited us to create a film that would promote the area as a great place to ‘live, work and play’ targeting a wide range of potential recruits within education, health and business.

They had recently seen our video for a medical practice in MacDuff and wanted a similar type of video. Far too many promo films on the web look and sound the same – lots of boring interviews in badly lit rooms with bad audio – that feel stiff and lack naturalness and authenticity. They asked us for a promotional film that would sing Moray’s song with the same depth of realness to interviews, quality of story, action, cinematography and sound design as our other video.

And make it stand out from the crowd – no pressure then!

Extra Credits

Aerial Filming: Paul Billany, Graham Madden, George McKnight

Marine filming: Malcolm Slater

Music: Josh Leake

The Solution

Film shoot: People & Places – After extensive talks with all involved, including local businesses, hospital and medical practices, schools and sports venues, we decided to go walkabout; talking to: young people, cafe owners, local arts and entertainment outlets.

We wanted to know what local people loved about their own backyard and ask them about their favourite haunts, activities and special places that they themselves would feature in a film about Moray.

This would give the film its essential felling of authenticity – it should be something that comes from the real heart of the place rather than from the imagination of the filmaker.

The friendly folks at the Visit Moray Speyside, were key in helping us to draw up a list of movers and shakers in the area – those with more extensive history and knowledge about Moray’s history, background, people and places.

This gave us our 4 shoots list days for our target places and sport activities:

1. Coastlines & beaches
2. Living and work
3. Cafes, restaurants, buildings
4. Highlands, rivers, mountains & forests

Interview styles: Work – Interviewees were invited from each sphere: education, law, business, medical, tourism.

Hit-List of key points were drawn up to make sure the video covered every everything it needed to say about what Moray offers as somewhere to live, work and play. Carefully crafted questions were used to hopefully trigger the main points during interviews.

Shooting Interviews outside eg. in their favourite cafe, on their daily river walk or in the middle of taking the dog for a run – although the most challenging in terms of weather and background noise would give the film more depth and interest and lead to a more relaxed interview experience for the folks involved.

Continuity – The action and background footage would give us our beginning and ending interspersed to signal moving from section to section throughout the story.

Sound Design – No music during interviews – instead continuity would be achieved by using carefully edited music/action breathers in between each section of interviews.

Hero shots & big ending – the ending is as important as the beginning of the movie. The bold punchy cinematic introduction draw the audience in to the meat and potatoes of the more ‘intimate’ interview content in the middle – so the ending needs to match the emotional impact of the beginning, hence decision to use a slow encircling/panning of each interviewee featured as the music draws the film to a close.