We were commissioned to provide full film production services to the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Sport and Exercise.
Client:
Edinburgh University | Sport & Exercise
Brief:
The climbing wall centre at the University of Edinburgh’s Sport & Exercise facility at the Pleasance put a project out to tender to produce a 5 minute safety briefing video for their bouldering wall.
The Context:
The University of Edinburgh has a world class sport and exercise facility at it’s premises in the Pleasance in the Old Town of Edinburgh. Part of this facility is a climbing wall centre, with a larger roped climbing wall room and a smaller bouldering wall room.
It is standard procedure for everyone coming to the centre to receive a briefing from the centre staff before they are allowed to use the bouldering facilities. This is for their own safety. Unfortunately accidents do happen and if someone were to be injured, there is no way of proving that all points were covered during a verbal briefing.
Not only that, but the time taken to verbally brief all participants would distract staff from other productive and supportive duties. So the team decided to commission a film to show wall users on a tablet before they can use the facilities. The users then tick a box to say they have seen the film and all parties are clear that the best level of safety briefing has been confirmed to have been watched by the intended participant before they grasp the first hold.
This ensures both consistency of message for users and also covers the University and its staff in the event of any user accident.
The Process:
The advantage of this job was being able to plan well in advance. The script was basically a well rehearsed standard briefing. I knew we would get the Climbing Wall Team Leader, Gerry, to do a piece to camera delivering the briefing and then overlay example B-roll.
In advance I took the script and broke it down, working with Gerry, to identify the shots needed and the text to overlay. Knowing we had a tight turn around in the morning, with the centre opening at 12 noon, I wanted to be as efficient as possible in the B-roll shooting, so colour coded all the shots and grouped them into localities e.g. reception, bouldering wall, climbing wall etc, rather than shooting chronologically.
Shooting in the morning was simple and fun, with a great bunch of volunteer climbers and much banter.
The piece to camera was a remarkably relaxed affair too, as there was a separate board room with decent background lighting which we could have all to ourselves. The only slight problem was the Pleasance Fringe Venue next door giving it big licks testing out their sound system for the festival. But it wasn’t enough to disrupt anything.
The edit was as simple as piecing together the clips corresponding to the table above. I picked up a breezy loop set to add some background interest and used text and colour mattes to create the instructional messages on the film.
We ensured fonts and colour references adhered to the brand guidelines which we sought from the Sport & Exercise marketing team.
All in all a fun wee job and an outcome we’re really happy with. Now we just need to actually go bouldering.
Get in touch today if you would like to enlist our film production services
Technical Specs:
Canon 60d
Canon 50mm f1.8 lens
Canon 18-55 f2.8 lens
Glidetrack SD-lite slider
Zoom H1 with a lav mic.
Single LED panel lighting.
Music:
Golden Skies by Liam Aidan (loop set version)