Documentary-style brand films about people who are exceptionally good at what they do. Researched properly, shot properly, and cut as a story rather than an advert.
An advert tells people what a company does. A film makes them understand why anyone bothers. That difference is mostly made before the camera comes out, in the time spent working out which story is actually the one.
It is usually not the product. It is the person who started it, the thing that nearly went wrong, the part of the process almost nobody outside gets to see, or the customer whose life quietly changed. Those films get watched to the end, sent on to other people, and still work in three years.
We film them the way a documentary is filmed. Real conversations, real environments, nothing read off an autocue, and enough room in the edit for the film to breathe.
“The ambition is that someone watches the film and feels something, understands something, or sees the company differently afterwards.”
Earl Duncan, s4digital
Four stages. The first is the one most people skip, and it is the one that decides whether the film is any good.
Time with you before anything is filmed. Who is in it, what they have been through, what nobody outside the company knows. We come back with the story we think it is, and you tell us whether we are right.
Two to three days on a cinema camera with proper sound. Interviews that are conversations, the work happening as it actually happens, and the environment the story lives in. Stills captured across the same days.
Cut as a story, not as a list of features. Structure first, then pace, then picture. You see it at rough cut, while changing it is still cheap, and again before it is finished.
Colour graded and sound mixed by people who do only that. At this level it is the difference between a film that looks expensive and one that looks like a video, and it is not a corner worth cutting.
One shoot, and everything that comes out of it. Yours to use wherever you want, for as long as you want.
Usually four to ten minutes, for the website, YouTube, events, sales conversations and recruitment.
Sixty to ninety seconds for the top of the site, and for the places where nobody is going to give you ten minutes.
Six to ten short pieces pulled from the same material, cut for the feed rather than squashed into it.
Stills captured across the same days, so the film and the pictures actually look like the same company.
Every project is scoped around the story and priced as one fixed figure, agreed in full before anything is booked, rather than a day rate that grows while you watch. Research, shooting, the edit, the grade, the mix and the full licence are all inside it.
When somebody in the business genuinely cares about what they make. When there is a founder with a story, a craft that takes years to learn, a customer whose life changed, or a reason the company exists beyond the margin.
It works hardest where trust is the thing actually being bought, where the price is high enough that people research before they commit, and where the competition all sound identical on paper.
If what you need is twenty posts a month, a film is the wrong purchase and we will say so. That is a content partnership, it costs a great deal less per month, and it is on the services page.
If it is needed next week, it is also the wrong purchase. A film takes six to ten weeks from the first conversation, and most of the quality lives in the part that cannot be rushed.
A documentary in production, a signwriter who works almost entirely by hand, and a professional boxer shot for a boxing brand.
Who is in it, what they do, and why you think there is a story there. We come back within one working day, and if we do not think there is a film in it we will say so.