Working for one of the largest architecture firms in Ireland to produce a new strand of content that shows the work they are doing in a modern but professional way.
It is geared towards digital production, social media and engagement, inside the practice as well as outside it.
A social-first series to mark International Women's Day at Ireland's largest architecture firm, highlighting the talents and the accomplishments of the female architects working there. Five architects, five subjects, five different focuses, all cut for a social-first feel.
From my side it was a very dynamic day or two of shooting. Site visits, each one showing a different area of expertise in a different way, and five different locations to find at speed. I was learning the various roles inside an architecture firm as I went, which was foreign to me.
It was an interview setup, so it was asking questions. The upside is that the answers come back naturalistic. The downside is that you do not have full control of what people say the way you would with a script. You are pulling them away from their desks. This is not a studio, it is not a set day, and nobody has hollowed out their calendar for it. You get what you get, and that is what it is.
A series of short documentaries, less focused on people and more focused on specialities: education and architecture, AI and architecture, sustainability and architecture.
What I learned here was a production strategy worth keeping. Rather than moving through the office with a camera trying to catch natural moments of people working, we cheated it slightly. We built workshops and environments where people would talk naturally about the subject of the film we were making, then dropped a camera into that.
We also used a teleprompter and shot the subjects looking straight down the lens. That gives the viewer something very intimate. It lets people be specific, because the script is written beforehand, and it gives the film a flow and a tempo from the outset that you are not editing in later.
Coming in and working across the whole production on my own, in an office of over three hundred people, moving at pace around their schedules while they are still doing their architecture work.
Getting people in and out of setups, lighting, scripting, making them comfortable, interviewing, and finishing it inside a day, post included.
That is the hard part. It is demanding on your time and you make a lot of decisions very quickly.