The brief
Storytelling on an international scale
The NHS is an organisation that relies on so many people to function. Looking after the number of patients that it does, it really requires dedicated, passionate and knowledgeable people from both the UK and abroad. There is a real recognition that people from other parts of the world want to be part of a world renowned health service like the NHS and have valuable skills that we desperately need. What the NHS can offer these people is a whole range of exciting, rewarding and necessary careers and it’s incredible that so many people come from all over the world to be part of these careers.
However, not every NHS career, regardless of how vital they are, gets the credit it deserves. One of those is Community Nursing. It’s a career that isn’t always held in high regard, but it’s a service that saves lives and protects people in our communities. Solent NHS Trust recognised the need for more community nurses, particularly from international backgrounds, and asked us to help create a film for an ongoing campaign about it.
Amongst other things, the Trust wanted us to create a central film; a film that would promote Community Nursing careers to an international audience and help allay some of their concerns. The film needed to directly address some of the challenges (like leaving your home country) but also show people that Community Nursing is vital and personally rewarding. This film would be connected in with other content and films and therefore had to really speak to some of the core messages of the whole campaign.
What we did
When the brief came our way, we had a clear idea of how we wanted to approach the film. We had done some research, we’d seen films on similar topics and we made the decision to move away from this a little. This wasn’t because those films were bad, we just didn’t want to make something that was exactly the same and help this campaign to stand out.
For us, we felt that the best way to tell this story was by creating a personal mini-doc style film. It was our opinion that this style would give someone more room to talk about their experiences and to build a clearer picture of why Community Nursing is such a rewarding career from an international perspective. We felt that this way of doing things would ultimately form a more meaningful connection with the audience and that this would be key for getting more people interested in the career. The only potential challenge was that we needed a central storyteller for the film. Luckily for us, Solent NHS Trust had someone in mind; enter Ana.
Ana embodied everything that it means to be a community nurse and so we built the story around her; her move from Portugal, her change of career and her love for her new found career.
In total we spent 3 days with Ana. 1 was spent interviewing her and the rest were spent capturing b-roll with Ana in a range of different settings and scenarios. These weren’t necessarily full days, but we scheduled so many in so that we could be reactive to a Community Nurse’s busy and potentially changeable schedule. The project required that we be light, flexible and reactive whilst still retaining a certain level of production value.
The technical
Story planning
Schedules and timelines
3 days of filming
Editing
Music licensing
Subtitling
The result
The full story
The project culminated in a film about Ana herself. That wasn’t a problem though, because she is symbolic of what it means to be a community nurse. By sharing her unique perspective, the film is able to show internationals why they can flourish in a Community Nursing career. She loves the career so much that it didn’t really matter that she was sharing her story, because it’s such a universal one. It was a pleasure to meet Ana and to work on this film.
