The brief
Personal stories to drive change
SoCo Music Project is a charity that changes lives through music. Through their programmes, workshops and promotion work the charity uses music as a way of driving change in the community.
As well as running social impact projects, the charity also proactively looks to champion young, local musicians. One of these artists is Shannon B.
Shannon’s story is one of positivity. It’s the embodiment of music having a positive impact on someone’s life. For her, music is about staying on a positive path. It’s a dream, borderline obsession which shapes her as a person. SoCo Music Project wanted to share this story to show other people how music could do that for them.
What we did
We were really fortunate in that Shannon had such a great story to tell. In order to get to the heart of that story we spent some time speaking with the charity about Shannon, her story and how it embodied the mission of SoCo. This put us in a really story position to create the film. For this particular project there was quite a tight time constraint due to the storyteller and location, so this prep work was vital.
For this film we had 1 location to work with. After some initial concern, we saw this as a challenge. It was actually kind of exciting to try and get enough background for the scenes we needed to shoot. Really it was a case of mapping out Shannon’s story, how we could visualise this and then match that with the location that we had.
We shot this film in a day at the charity’s Hightown Studio. With a small crew, some very specific lighting kit and a camera package suited to handheld work we were ready to go. The plan was to capture a snapshot of Shannon’s process and use this as the visuals for the film. We had a specific look in mind, and we had planned the setups we needed to get it, so really it was a case of making that happen. As well capturing shots of Shannon writing and recording, we also captured an interview with her.
The location dictated a few things and we had to be adaptable but the shoot went super smoothly.
All the planning paid off when it came to the edit. We knew the story we wanted to tell inside out, so the edit came together very quickly. It was helped by the fact that we were working with such a passionate storyteller in Shannon.
The technical
Concept development
Schedules and timelines
Style development
Filming
Post-production
Music Licensing
The result
When people and purpose meet.
Working on this film was a joy. We were able to tell the story of Shannon’s art but also talk about something much bigger. Her story matched the mission of So:Co Music Project perfectly, which allowed us to create a piece of branded content. The film says something about the charity without needing to throw their name around every few seconds.
