Education

The Royal College of Art - Meet the RCA

The Royal College of Art (the RCA) is an internationally renowned post graduate institution which was voted the world’s leading art and design university for the fifth consecutive year in 2020.

The RCA approached NextShoot to create a series of five insightful portrait films about staff working in a variety of fields at the college, with the aim of capturing a sense of the people who make the RCA special – their inspirations, their practice, and how they support their students in their learning.

Our video production company in London filmed two-camera interviews with the tutors and captured filmic broll related to their practice, inspirations and teaching. We looked to shoot a variety of set-ups at locations both on and off campus, to bring a visual variety and interest to the content.

The five portrait films have a consistency in approach and a look & feel that binds them together as a coherent campaign, and that puts the tutors front and centre in explaining why the RCA is considered the most influential postgraduate institution of art and design in the world.

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Hantang

NextShoot’s video agency in London was asked to produce a series of videos for leading Chinese media company Hantang, in which we met senior academics teaching on some of the UK’s leading fashion courses: Zowie Broach - Head of Fashion at the Royal College of Art; Judith Clark - Professor of Fashion and Museology at London College of Fashion; Claire Wilcox - Professor in Fashion Curation at London College of Fashion; and Fabio Piras - MA Fashion Course Director, Central St. Martins.

In this portrait series each academic protagonist provides a scripted, poetic voiceover recorded on location that explores the inspiration behind their practice and their approach to teaching. This voiceover is supported by visuals with high production values, shot on the Arri Mini by crew that included a 1st and 2nd AC and a gimbal operator.

The results are beautiful portrait films of some of the leading fashion academics in the country,

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British School of Fashion

The British School of Fashion (the BSOF) was founded in Glasgow in 1875. It now offers fashion courses to a global cohort of students in its contemporary campus in the East End of London.

NextShoot was commissioned by the BSOF to produce a stylish 90 second video that would appeal to potential new students using the campaign slogan ‘It All Starts Here.’

Our corporate video agency in London filmed with current BSOF students and one of their tutors over the course of a day. We chose not to include interviews or even a voiceover, and instead let aspirational imagery with text overlays make the case.

We included scenes showing different activities in a variety of locations on the campus and in the vibrant surrounding area of Brick Lane. Throughout we focused on injecting movement into the shots and on emphasising the positive vibes and sense of camaraderie enjoyed by the fashion students. The video ends emphatically with a group shot as the undergraduates enter the school, accompanied by a bold text overlay of the campaign slogan - 'It All Starts Here.'

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The Royal Shakespeare Company

The Royal Shakespeare Company (the RSC) is dedicated to making Shakespeare accessible and enjoyable for young people, both with its performances and with the educational content it produces and shares online as learning resources in support of the national curriculum.

To supplement this educational remit NextShoot’s corporate video production company in London was invited to structure, shoot and edit a series of videos for students studying Shakespeare at GCSE and A-Level, to form part of the ‘RSC Shakespeare Learning Zone'.

NextShoot worked closely with the company’s education department ahead of filming to plan for each shoot. On the day we filmed with cast members and directors of recently staged RSC productions. With a dedicated sound recordist, two camera operators and three cameras we captured their group exploration of each play’s text, their rehearsal exercises, and performances of key scenes.

The edited content, cut with the Shakespeare Learning Zone brand graphics, gave students insights into the techniques deployed by the playwright in his storytelling and the creative processes used by the actors and director to draw out the meaning from each text. Our videos have been watched many hundreds of thousands of times on the RSC’s YouTube channel.

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Young England Kindergarten

At the other end of the educational spectrum from the RCA post graduates are the 2.5 - 5 year old children at the Young England Kindergarten. While the student cohorts may have different skills and agendas, the process of producing a video that meets the needs of any educational establishment are, of course, the same. It’s about understanding the client’s objectives, devising a plan that meets their requirements and executing it with imaginative fiming and considered post-production.

With this video for the Young England Kindergarten in Pimlico in Central London we interviewed the Principal, Kay King, and Head Teacher, Lucinda Byron Evans. The interview responses provided the editorial structure for the video by touching on the facilities, access to a large garden and allotment in neighbouring St. George’s Square, the highly capable team of staff, lessons including Mandarin, dancing, yoga and music, and the creation of an environment for children that is both rewarding and fun.

4 years after we produced the video, it still sits on the Young England website homepage. We like to think that for some of the 4000 prospective parents who have viewed the piece, it played some part in encouraging them to pick up the phone, request a visit or make an application.

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Digital Dickens

NextShoot created a series of videos related to the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations, as part of the online Digital Dickens project, with a view in particular of supporting students studying the book as part of their GCSE English Literature curriculum.

Our video production team interviewed experts, including Dr Jeremy Clarke from Rochester's Guildhall Museum, and gathered broll in the Medway region connected to the book and material related to Dickens’ life that had a bearing on the novel, including his home, the building in Rochester that was the inspiration for Satis House, and the Swiss chalet in which he penned his work.

The videos included ‘A History of Prison Hulks’, ‘A look inside Dickens' house Gadshill in Rochester’ and ‘An exploration of Dickens' time in Kent and Rochester’. The mixture of interviews, specially shot broll and historical stills and print imagery proved a successful format to engage both students and lovers of Dickens in perhaps his most famous literary work.

International Training by the V&A

The Victoria and Albert Museum (the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied and decorative art, design and sculpture. With 145 galleries across a 12.5 acre site, it has a permanent collection of more than 2.27 million objects that span 5,000 years of art - from ancient times to the modern day.

The V&A runs a series of intensive courses offering training to international museum professionals and the opportunity to work with V&A staff on specific aspects of museum practice. The courses are led by V&A experts and include hands-on workshops and lectures.

NextShoot was invited to create a video that captured the essence of the international training courses. Our video production company in London filmed over the course of a day at the V&A in South Kensington, capturing interviews with the course leaders, footage of the workshops, and testimonial vox-pops with attendees from overseas who were responsible for learning programmes within their own museums in Cyprus, Argentina, Greece, Austria, Denmark, Finland and Singapore.

We edited the interviews, vox-pops and b-roll footage with some stock shots of the exterior of the building provided by the museum to create an engaging video that sets out the V&A’s expertise in training and the positive feedback the museum received from its course participants. We feel it’s a video that demonstrates why NextShoot is considered one of the go-to corporate video production companies in London for both training video content and museum video production.