The Challenge
Produce a long form video for the Wales and Western maintenance roadshow, demonstrating the lead up to their next control period. This video was commissioned to cover multiple topics and projects from the Wales and Western and the Wales and Borders teams. These topics included but were not limited to:
- Remote Maintenance Technology
- Climate Challenges
- Increased Safeguarding Measures
- Employee service
- Innovative projects
Network Rail also requested multiple filming days across numerous locations to cover all the projects.
Furthermore Network Rail wanted to convey the key theme of going from ‘good to great’, showing a levelling up of the quality across the works they carry out.
The Approach
We agreed upon a number of filming shifts with Network Rail throughout the Wales and Western region. The locations varied from Shrewsbury to Pontypool.
We set out to obtain numerous interviews from influential figures working in the Wales and Western region. These interviews would give insight into the latest technology, climate challenges and increased safeguarding measures. We managed to conduct these interviews over a single filming shift.
Furthermore, we allocated two filming shifts to collect footage of the innovative projects. This involved staging scenarios for the projects as well as interviewing the project leads to discuss the provided benefits. These shifts also provided some time to gather a portion of additional b-roll footage. In general, the more b-roll we can capture, the better we are able to manoeuvre during the edit.
A shift was organised to capture the final shift of ‘Bob’, a long standing Network Rail employee as part of highlighting employee service. Bob’s last day involved interviewing him and his colleagues and capturing his last patrol across the Britannia Bridge. The unscripted nature of this footage would help add more of an emotional hook to the overall video.
The Result
We captured a substantial level of content for this project resulting in a complicated edit. The interviews were stitched together to form the main structure of the video. Once we were happy with the narrative, we filled in the any gaps and cuts in the edit with b-roll footage. We try to make the footage shown over the dialogue as relevant as possible. Once all the video and audio footage was in place, we added graphics to ease transitions between topics and add further context to each section.
Once we had gone through a draft edit, we realised something wasn’t quite right with the video. We didn’t have a strong opening and closing shots of the region. These would normally be contextual, cinematic drone, on the ground shots or timelapse, however due to our focus on the topics, we hadn’t had time to dedicate a day to capturing some high quality b-roll of the Wales and Western area. We requested an extra filming day from Network Rail to gather the necessary footage and they happily obliged. We sent an operative out as soon as we could to capture some truly stunning footage.
With some beautiful opening and closing shots added to the edit, we now had a video that both us and Network Rail were over the moon with.
“I love the video and Dave thinks its brilliant!”