COVID-19 has forced us to change how we bring on new clients, including creating a new way for our production team to capture interviews remotely.

We’re working with Inspiring Futures through Learning (IFtL), to create a professional development and learning platform for their family of schools. Their ambition is to share best practice across the schools, and learn from one another.

IFtL are using a version of our ReelPlatform product to deliver professional development and training videos and they are augmenting this with clips from our extensive library of content shot in the UK and around the world. The real challenge has been how to record new content during lockdown.

Filming requires quite a lot of people behind the scenes. Even for a 1-on-1 interview, there is the interviewee, the director/interviewer, the camera person, the sound person and a producer. We have to think about the technicalities of sound, the lighting, the positioning of the shot as well as what the interviewee actually says and does. These are all things that become very tricky when we cannot all be in the same room.

Client background

IFtL is a Multi-Academy Trust, established in 2016 and have 12 schools in their trust across Milton Keynes and Northamptonshire.

They celebrate the uniqueness of their schools, and have an ambition to share best practice across each setting and learn together. IFtL offers learning and development to all staff – including the teaching and support staff as well as professional team and governors.

Client challenges

The challenges for this project included:

  • Sharing best practice across schools
  • Managing learning and development across a growing number of schools throughout the Trust, when getting together in training sessions is not logistically practical
  • Enabling self-initiated learning with staff across the Trust
  • Providing quality assured content that is geared around focus areas of their professional development plans

This was a very exciting set of challenges to work with as it was, then lockdown hit. Our main task quickly became how could we capture new video content from IFtL ready for a launch in September 2020.

Project background

The solution was to use video conferencing to get the team together, but we knew the quality of the video output would not be good enough from web cameras on their computers.

So we posted lights and microphones to the interviewees to attach to their phones and tablets. On the day of filming the cameraman was on a video conference call with the interviewee, talking them through how to set up the camera, the shot and the lighting. Once that was all in place the director stepped into the video conference to talk to the interviewee about what was going to happen and the producer dialled in to quality control and link the interview into the bigger vision.

The result was a series of videos, edited and ready to be uploaded on the platform for all the users to watch and discuss.

Project results

Using ReelPlatform, IFtL are establishing a new online way of learning and training delivery.

Further filming is planned across the schools to capture content from a range of staff. We’ll be doing this remotely for the foreseeable future, but do hope to get into the classroom to work with the teachers and pupils soon. 

Within a week, we produced a demonstration version of ReelPlatform set up and branded as IFtL. We then worked with the team to develop their search themes and key words.  

Within two weeks IFtL staff were set up and ready to film remotely. We sourced mics to hook into their phones, phone stands to hold the video recording steady and lights to get a good picture.

We have established a method of remote filming to enable filming to take place during lockdown, but also act as a mechanism for staff to carry on capturing their updates for the platform going forwards.

We are continuing to develop content over the summer and will be launching the platform to all staff across IFtL for September 2020.