Casting from the floor
Notes on making brand films with the people who actually do the work, and what changes when you do.
Brand films about workplaces tend to arrive at the same shape: a drone, a narrator, and four actors who have never held the tool they are holding. It tests well and it convinces nobody who works there.
The alternative is slower and it is mostly not a camera problem. It is a trust problem, and trust is bought with time on the floor before anything is shot.
The sequence that works
- Spend time on the floor with no camera at all, long enough to stop being a novelty
- Interview on audio only, more people than you need, and listen for the ones who talk in specifics
- Shoot to the shift, never the other way round
- Cut what they actually said, not what the deck wanted them to say
The line you have to hold
Someone will ask for one clean line to close the film, and there will be a temptation to write it and have a worker read it. That single decision undoes everything the previous three weeks bought. If nobody on the floor said it, it does not go in.
The measure is not whether the client likes it in the review. It is whether the people in it are comfortable when it plays in the canteen the following week.
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