The Bartlett School

There are many valuable things that come out of the dirt. Gold, diamonds – and knowledge.  Nearly five years ago, University College London, one of the world’s most prestigious universities, was given several million dollars by an Australian mining company to establish the Institute for Sustainable Resources at The Bartlett, UCL’s global faculty of the built environment.

Its mission is to develop new ways of thinking and solving some of the world’s most pressing problems around resources.  And when The Bartlett wanted a video to showcase its new Masters in Sustainable Resources, it turned to Tallboy.

The brief:

We’d worked with The Bartlett before when we made videos promoting its School of Construction and Project Management.  So our brief was simple; we were to do something similar in look and feel to attract students to this new field.

One of the pleasures in working with Bartlett is their participants are all so knowledgeable and interesting. The downside of this is that it means we tend to overshoot the interviews, simply because our team finds the subjects they cover fascinating! This time we were asked to produce two videos, one for the new Masters in Sustainable Resources, and further one for the existing Master of Research in Energy Demand Studies.

The approach:

For the existing course, we put together three students and asked them to just talk to each other about their experiences and their prospects now they had finished the course. We wanted the conversation to be as spontaneous and as natural as possible, so we used two cameras to ensure we could let the chat flow without stops and starts.

That video also included a separate interview with the tutor. He is an incredibly knowledgeable and passionate man, which meant we had the challenge of getting him to focus, as like many people in his position, he just wanted to tell us about everything!

For the video promoting the Masters in Sustainable Resources, we had a different challenge as the course is new and therefore no students have started it yet.  We shot two interviews: one with the Head of the Institute and the second with a PhD student who has the option of taking the course.  Again, content was not a problem, as both interviewees were passionate about their subject.

To give potential students the taste for UCL, as well as for the subject matter, we added in some shots of London and the UCL campus, showing the incredible facilities on offer. We custom-made a graphic that gave both videos the same look and feel, and added in the

Macquarie

Macquarie Group is a leading provider of financial, advisory, investment and funds management services. It is a global operation with offices in the world’s major financial centres.

The brief:

Macquarie wanted to attract really talented people to join their graduate programme.  They needed to show potential recruits the vast range of opportunities at the company, but take in consideration the age of the potential audience wanted the series of videos to be engaging and upbeat.

The approach:

We felt it was important the video had both authenticity and energy and so it was apparent to us that the stars of the video should be the current graduate trainees.  We wanted them to tell their own stories, giving an honest insight into their lives as a graduate at Macquarie.

To achieve that, we had to make sure the graduates were relaxed and as natural as possible. We used two cameras to ensure spontaneity. The first camera used a special gadget called an eyedirect device, which helped the graduates speak directly in a conversational way to camera. The second camera was set at an angle to show some of the filming kit, giving perspective to the shoot and making it visually interesting.

The result:

The film was shown on the graduate recruitment pages of the Macquarie website. It’s pacey, engaging and in some parts, humorous – and captures exactly what the client was looking for.