Right At School is the largest educational company for after school programs in the USA. They'd done videos in the past but it was time to really raise the bar with a brand film aimed at their audience of potential and current business partners as well as parents, school districts, and communities across the United States.
We pitched the idea of creating a heartfelt and authentic, yet slightly stylized "day in the life" at Right At School. We worked with RAS' internal marketing team as we wrote the script, which we based on Zoom interviews with all participants.
Froth & Fur's Patrick Ortman explains "It was very important to me to base the dialog in the script on the interview subjects' own words. Yeah, this is a stylized, slightly glossy docustyle production- but it also had to ring true. I wanted to bring authenticity and plenty of heart to the production, so we went the extra mile to make it so."
Then we collaborated with RAS' project lead to plan and shoot the multi-city three day production on the West Coast. "Planning was key. I brought in a very experienced DP and we shot it on Alexa using Zeiss superspeeds. We took time to light things well when it mattered and I tend to like the ultra natural soft falloff of techniques like book lights, negative fill, and so on. But we worked together to make sure we didn't go overboard. It had to feel grounded. So, the camera is handheld most of the time and we generally had one take with the kids since we weren't working with professional actors."
The production also included a number of remote interviews, conducted online.
A few months later, we came back to the project to create three TV commercials from the footage for a connected TV campaign in key US cities.
The brand film won a raft of awards and you can still see it on Right At School's homepage. Here's what their Chief Marketing Officer had to say:
We have received nothing but exuberant feedback from all stakeholders - from our CEO to potential business partners who have been "blown away". I'm writing this review only one week after the project was completed and I can already say it's been worth it. This video will provide value to us for years to come (that is high praise considering the speed at which these types of videos usually lose relevancy). Kudos!