In partnership with Spindogs, we were tasked to create a video campaign, supported with a suite of photography content that showcased the career paths and experiences available within the Cardiff University College of Biomedical Life Sciences (BLS). While an aspirational destination for many students, BLS wanted to raise the profile of the school and recruit students for the 2022/23 academic year.
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Key to BLS’ recruitment strategy was a digital campaign – starting in September 2021 – aimed at increasing applications for all subjects within BLS. Aimed mostly at A-level students, the campaign also targeted mature students. BLS developed a strong creative solution, ‘A place where…’, which drove the deliverables, narrative and subsequent campaign. To ensure the University meets its’ obligations, a portion of the campaign was required to be delivered in Welsh in addition to English. Our team gained the opportunity to visit current students within different departments of BLS, to capture an authentic “day in the life” video; translating true emotion and experiences from each passionate student.
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From the brief given, our team ran an internal workshop – to storyboard and structure how the video was going to be told. The candidates selected for the video were chosen by Cardiff University’s Engagement Officer, Lauren Matherick; who selected an aspiring Doctor, Nurse, Dentist, Optometrist and Pharmacist. From here, we were able to further discuss with the students the plan of each day and what we were hoping to achieve from each day of shooting.
To ensure the interview was kept as a natural discussion, our team prepared a series of questions; firstly, a generic set of prompts focusing on their experience at Cardiff University as a whole, and how the University has helped them to get to where they are currently. Secondly; more specific questions designed individually for each graduate; focusing on why they chose this path and what they enjoy about their career. All of these questions helped to lead to an authentic response for the strapline, “A Place Where”.
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The overall concept was to film each student as they carry out a “day in the life” within Cardiff University BLS, showing a variety of responsibilities and versatility within each career path. Prior to us visiting, we discussed with each graduate what procedures they were able to carry out that could be visually engaging for us to capture; this was to ensure we had compelling imagery to support the spoken interview. We captured footage of the students treating patients, carrying out important tasks as well as front-on, face-to-camera shots – with the intention to apply decorative animated typography on top within post-production.
When it came to visualising the messaging, our idea was to highlight the key sentence “A Place Where…” spoken by each student captured in the interview through animated type. We visited several versions of how the type could be visualised (pictured below) before reaching our final solution.
Our final solution was to create a hand-drawn style of typography to translate a more personal feeling to the messaging. The style of the lettering was primarily inspired by the Cardiff University brand guidelines; using their Franklin Gothic typeface in a heavy weight as a template, as well as their primary red and secondary pink from the colour palette to create 3D lettering for each message. These were decorated with small highlights and motion lines, which were then animated in a stop-frame style to give the illusion of these elements being organically hand-drawn. Cardiff University
We produced a high quality, 4k video that translated a genuine experience from within the industries each student was training for. The video was shot over the course of two days, with editing taking approximately a week; this included animating the illustrated text within post-production.
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