Durham Area Youth | IWILL Campaign Film
Elevating the Voices of Young People
Durham Area Youth (DAY) were looking to create a campaign film about an important topic to the youth, led by the youth. We were asked to facilitate this, including the planning, shooting and editing, giving them the opportunity to be involved throughout.
Why a campaign film?
We are huge advocates for video because of the longevity and emotional impact. Understanding how to evoke a feeling in the audience plays a huge part in video production, because this often leads to action, which is particularly important in the majority of the projects we undertake. The beautiful thing about video is that, if planned thoroughly, it can serve you for a very long time. It can be re-shared, re-edited to stay current, re-purposed, and is generally the type of content people prefer to digest because of the way complex issues can be visually simplified. They’re memorable, shareable and tend to be quite succinct, which, when you consider our attention spans, is the perfect combination for social media.
PHASE 1 | Pre-Production
As always, we wanted to dig deeper into the topic the group wanted to shine a light on and the approach they wanted to take before making creative decisions.
Campaign films can take shape in lots of different ways. You can create a narrative based film using actors, interview-led films, sharing lived experiences, you can create something visual through motion graphics and statistics. We gave the youth free rein of the approach they wanted to take, this was their time to create something meaningful to them. They felt excited to create a narrative based film, with one of the youth in particular being interested in acting. The story itself was actually based on his lived experience of bullying, and during our initial workshop with them we heard some very personal stories being shared which was bittersweet because although it’s sad to hear the things people have had to go through, it was lovely to hear them opening up about experiences, knowing we were part of such a safe and supportive environment and giving them an outlet to express themselves.
During this initial workshop which lasted a couple of hours, we established crew roles, actors and a plan of action for the narrative, including locations and a scene breakdown, ready for the shoot! We then went away and pulled together thorough plans for each of the shoots that could be shared with the young people, along with visual inspiration and briefing documents for actors and crew.
PHASE 2 | Shooting
To capture all of the elements of the story, we needed to split the shoot into various locations. DAY helped us to navigate this to make sure all the youth were in the right place at the right time with proper supervision. Our crew members included sound and camera, and we had a number of actors involved throughout the film including the main character, the bullies, and friends. We were blown away by their dedication and one youth in particular really impressed us with her attention to detail and initiative, she would tell us things needed to be reshot if there were any interruptions, which we thought was amazing, we can definitely see her bossing it in this industry in the future! Our main character also gave a superb performance. The topic was super delicate as it covered both bullying and suicide, so it wasn’t an easy task to act as the main character, but we felt that he delivered a moving performance and handled the main role with care and understanding.
PHASE 3 | Edit
We compiled all of the shoots and edited together a main film as well as a trailer so that DAY had an end product they could distribute and share among staff and the youth. This project won the Social Action Biggest Impact Award at the Durham Area Youth 2024 Awards, and we even received a gorgeous thank you card from the youth - so lovely!