World Book Day
Filming brilliant, hard-to-capture authors for classrooms across the UK, five years running
Filming brilliant, hard-to-capture authors for classrooms across the UK, five years running
Snapshot
Client: World Book Day, the children's literacy charity
Sector: Cultural and educational
Delivered: Filmed author and illustrator content every spring from 2014 to 2019, published on the World Book Day website for schools
Standout result: Five consecutive years of repeat commissions, ending only when Covid broke the annual cycle
Five years of filmed author interviews and drawing demonstrations, plus a live theatre event in the final year, edited for schools across the UK to use on World Book Day and throughout the year, for a charity whose contributors had to be handled with care.
World Book Day wanted the voices of leading children's authors and illustrators on film, to show children that anyone can write and draw stories. The people being filmed were compelling in a room and had performed their seminars many times, but what works face to face does not always work on camera. Some authors talked without pausing and were hard to edit. Others went quiet and stayed in their own heads. And every one of them came to us through World Book Day's own relationship, which could not be strained for the sake of a shot.
The situation
The outcome
World Book Day came back every spring for five years, from 2014 to 2019, and the run ended only because Covid disrupted the cycle. The relationship changed shape as it went. In the early years we had to keep explaining why a technique that felt wrong in the room would work better online. By 2017 and 2018 they trusted those calls straight away, which made for faster shoot days and more natural content. The finished films went onto the World Book Day website for schools across the country to use on the day and throughout the year.
What we did, and the decisions behind it
Our job was the edit, so we were responsible for whether each piece worked. That meant shaping the filming for what the edit would need, even though World Book Day held the relationship with every author. We handled that with soft negotiation: reading each author, and choosing the right moment to step in while letting the client lead. One example was asking an author to answer again after they had given their usual spiel, so we came away with the short, clear soundbites that would cut together into something a child would want to watch.
The setups changed every time, so we adapted to each one. Illustrators alone ranged from someone working in pen and paper to someone arriving with bags of sketchbooks, each setup needing different camera positions and lighting. For Dick n Dom, we turned a corner of an office into a chaotic makeshift study in under an hour before they arrived. In the final year, we recorded as-live at the Unicorn Theatre in front of hundreds of school children: we placed cameras within the audience so no child's view was blocked and no one was put at risk, put mics on every guest, ran films into the screen, and took a live feed from the illustrator drawing on stage.
If this is your organisation
If you run a cultural or educational organisation and you need your people on film (authors, performers, curators, experts) for an audience you cannot gather in one room, the hard part is rarely the camera. It is getting people who are brilliant in person to come across on film when every session is set up differently, and doing that without straining the relationships your organisation depends on. That was World Book Day's situation for five years, and it is the types of project we love working on.
Book a discovery call. Tell us who you need to film and where, and we will talk through how we would capture them at their best without getting in the way of your own work with them.
