The Princes Trust offers free programmes to give young people the practical skills and financial support they need to stabilise their lives. Since 1976, they have supported one million young people across the UK and have returned £1.4 billion in value to society. At Production Attic, we created an interactive film to help demonstrate the effect making good choices could have on the viewers day and set them up for success in the future.
When we began work on this campaign, the Princes Trust were initially looking for a two-minute film that would demonstrate how effective time management, sense of responsibility and civic pride could make the viewer a good candidate for a career in health and social care. Because the Princes Trust is dedicated to working with eleven to thirty-year-old’s – we pitched a more interactive approach to ensure the viewers engagement. You can play our interactive video below:
productionattic.com/portfolio/start
As you can see from the interactive video – the lessons are pretty clear, and our concern was that a normal film ran the risk of being dismissed by the viewer as too simplistic. We proposed a first-person viewpoint to put the audience in the actor’s shoes. To further the interactive nature of the campaign, we added an element of ‘choose your own adventure’.
We were conscious of making our main character someone that any viewer could relate to. The best way for us to demonstrate this was by creating a first-person narrative. By filming with a Go-Pro, we could ensure our audience was not to be swayed by biases such as the age, gender or the appearance of the main character.
We found that we were able to achieve our desired outcome by having our director wear a GoPro, which was then monitored remotely by our Technical Director. Our only major difficulty were the occasional shadows in the film. We were able to solve this problem by rotoscoping the footage to remove the camera shadow.
To ensure the experience was seamless and also perfectly branded to our client and their Start Something campaign, we built a HTML 5 video player from scratch. This player meant we were able to style the graphics to match The Princes Trust branding. It required extensive testing across multiple devices and browsers, but eventually we had a finished product that our client could embed online across multiple platforms.
