'Speak!' Educational Drama
Client: Routes into Languages (West Midlands Consortium)
Run time: 15 minutes
Description: Educational Drama
Product Categories: Learning & Development, Promotional Video
Skills Demonstrated: Film production, audience awareness, outcome focused script development, professional production skills, use of evidence based research.
We're dramatic about learning...
The Routes into Languages fund was created to support projects encouraging the study of languages at school and University. In this instance the West Midlands regional consortium was seeking a video based product aimed at 13-14 year olds with the hope of 'enhancing' languages as a positive GCSE choice.
Instead of pitching the usual 'corporate' video style film with people talking about how much they loved languages, we researched the media habits of the 'skins' generation. Using our findings we pitched a drama based film staring young attractive characters that use languages as a part of their every day lives.
In order to create an honest portrayal of teen life we secured the rights to feature 'Facebook' as a key part of the film as well as commissioning original music and songs aimed at our target audience. The film was shot on location over several days with a professional cast and crew.
During post production we engaged in research and 'proving' activities to enable us to test the audience response to our work. This exercise was vital in enhancing and refining the film as well as proving the positive influence on the target audience to the consortium.
The success of this initial project lead to a second commission for a series of dramas to be used in the same way. This series in in production now.
