NORWICH BID
The Next Chapter
Puzzles, long walks, banana bread… oh god no, not the banana bread. Sound familiar to you? That’s right, we’re talking about Covid 19 and the many lockdowns we faced. A time where things stood still, but plenty of chaos happened too – certainly something we are not used to! Norwich Business Improvement District approached film companies with a brief to create a video to represent Norwich as a hub of outstanding independent business, and that it was opening up again after the pandemic.
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Three demographics were considered to market Norwich as an ideal destination; families, countryside lovers and young mini breakers – the types who love an edgy coffee shop. The video would do this by showing a variety of landmarks and visiting the friendly local businesses that give Norwich its strong identity. It needed to encourage people to step back onto the streets and drive tourism to Norfolk.
Ever wanted to pause time? Well, that’s kind of what we did in this film. A series of ‘frozen in time’ vignettes capturing scenes of moments of real life that people had been missing out on after being locked away from all human contact for months…
This was guided by the voiceover written by Grafik Language and enhanced by lots of clever techniques. Our thinking behind this concept is that it reflected the fact that life was ‘on pause’ during lockdown. We wanted to play with the transition from this period of frozen time to energetic movement, creating a contrast that represented normality falling back into action.
To do this, we had to set our camera to a very high frame rate and when ‘action’ was called this prompted all of our actors and extras to freeze whilst Joe ran around them quickly with the camera. As the footage was slowed down in the edit, the slightest movement that anyone may have made becomes entirely unnoticeable… ‘simply seamless’… maybe that should be our film companies’ new tagline?
Behind the scenes
What makes this film brilliant is the people. So many wonderful local residents and businesses volunteered their time to help out with the making of this video and support their city. Norwich isn’t a huge place and so as well as the support of the general public, we had many family and friends star in this video; be it, Joe’s Step-Dad in a dressing gown or Adam’s sister on a paddle boat.
