This year we were approached by the Florey Institute to make a fundraising video. The video needed to educate viewers on what the Florey do, highlight the importance of their work and use emotion to drive donations. This was one of our favourite jobs for 2017 and a lot of work went into bringing it together. Read on to find out how it all panned out!
Background Information: The Florey
The Florey Insitute is the largest brain research group in the Southern Hemisphere. They concentrate on a range of diseases like Stoke, Epilepsy, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and have made some huge scientific advancements in these areas. The Florey receives some funding through state and federal governments but relies heavily on major philanthropic donations. The video was created to encourage these kind of donations.
Conception
We started conceptualising our video by looking at examples of similar work that we liked. This is a great way to start because it gives you ideas of what does and doesn’t work but it also allows you to show something to your clients to give them an idea of the direction you want to take a video.
The Qantas air safety video below was something that we kept coming back to. For our video we wanted to show people in different iconic locations and this had certainly been achieved in the Qantas video. Our locations wouldn’t be quite as exotic as the ones Qantas had access to but using a drone and a gimbal we could still make ours look great.
Our video would feature scientists that are currently researching at the Florey and prominent people that are involved with the Florey. The scientists would provide the background and information for the video while the prominent figures would highlight the importance of the Florey and the need for donations. As these figures are well known in the Melbourne business community we would be drawing on their personal brand to help connect with similar people that might want to donate to the Florey.
We started by scouting interesting locations that would go with the characters in each of their segments. Fred Mendelsohn in his library, Craig Drummond at the Medibank offices and so on. The great thing about shooting a video in so many locations is that you can achieve three things at once: take the viewer on a journey, give a distinct look to each subject and teach the audience something at the same time. Our aim was to take viewers through the Florey building in a way that was both visually interesting and captured the culture of the organisation.
Drawing on the influence of prominent Melbournians helped add credibility and gravitas to the video. We also featured a young woman that underwent life changing brain surgery, which added a lot of emotional impact to the film.
Filming
The gear list for our camera crew team was also pretty extensive. This was because we wanted a range of great looking footage with a lot of diverse shots. The bulk of the video was shot on a Sony FS5 but we also used a drone for arial footage, a slider to create smooth motion and a gimbal for tracking shots. An A7s was also used to create time-lapse shots of the Florey building and it’s interior.
We shot the entire video in 4K so it will look very sharp and detailed.
Result
Please view the video below for our client reaction to the completed video:
Ryan Spanger is one of Melbourne’s most respected and sought-after video production professionals. Ryan founded Dream Engine in 2002, and specialises in helping medium to large corporates, government departments, and the non-profit sector to connect with their audience more effectively by using video.
