thyssenkrupp
Brief
When you work in a large organisation with lots of moving parts you can often lose the impact your role has on the big picture when you’re focussed on the day to day. thyssenkrupp in the UK wanted to pull together the story of why they do what they do – ultimately everything they do leads to someone having access to their full home again, their independence and their safety. As part of this we were tasked with creating a film that would be shown internally initially to show how all the pieces come together.
Preproduction
We worked closely with the UK Marketing Manager to bring the idea to life, through the script and the visuals. One key part of this was that we would need to keep the project very quiet during production to keep the element of surprise for its unveiling. Having worked with TK for some time, we were able to quickly come to a meaningful narrative, including a skeleton cut to show how the film would progress before we picked cameras up. Going through this stage of Film Architecture really allows us to see how the film will work structurally and narratively and it was fundamental in the delivery of this film.
Production
Working under the cover of “ shooting the new promo film” (😎) we headed to the thyssenkrupp offices, warehouses and out to visit a customer. This film was to have two distinct tones to it – gloomy and light – filming in the Tees Valley winter certainly gave us the option to capture the gloom of the wet winter weather, this time of year also has a cosiness to it that we looked to include. Some of the sequences were shot out of hours to give us access to empty offices. We also spent some time with a customer who’d recently had an install of her new stairlift to bring the film full circle.
Postproduction
Building on the Skeleton Cut of the film, and the elements we’d shot through production enabled the first cut to come together very quickly. At this point in a film it’s very important to iron out any parts of the film that don’t fit or slow the film down – to do this we’ll use guide voiceovers and initial text placeholders to showcase where the film is headed. It’s always amazing to watch a Skeleton Cut be turned into the first drafts of the film, all of a sudden bringing the tone and vision to life. Once the cut for this film was approved it was time to give it the life it needed to complete it. This included adding the complete voiceover from the companies MD – which immediately gave it the warm feel around the work they do. This was contrasted by the grade in the film, making it gloomier in places and lifting it through the use of colour is a very important and often overlooked element of filmmaking. All of our films go through this process but this one particularly began to really come to life when the colour grade was added. The final touch for this film was bringing it on brand to make it really feel like a thyssenkrupp film. It’s very important and again, this is often overlooked, that our brand and our clients brand are two very separate entities, and that in a film like this it’s all about the client brand, not ours.
Results
Sitting at just over two and a half minutes in length, this film needed that space to breath and to tell its story. Allowing it to flow and to show people the other sides of their own organisation, as well as ultimately the difference they make to peoples lives was very important. The trade offs between the dark mornings, the heavy graft and the constant communication to the real changes these products and services make in customers lives. The relationships at play really made this film. Showcasing a company back to the people involved in it is always an interesting time – there were tears.
