Independent Age are a leading nationwide charity supporting older people facing financial hardship. They approached us to create a film for their renewed focus on financial hardship in later life. The film would be shown at an event attended by politicians, decision holders and influencing bodies, to demonstrate the growing issue of older people living in poverty and precarious financial situations. 

The film should be documentary style, featuring four case studies highlighting new thematic areas of work including challenging with Costs, Income, Home and Community.

We worked with Independent Age to identify case studies which clearly reflected their thematic areas of work: Costs, Income, Home and Community. As Independent Age are a nationwide charity it was important to find stories across country to showcase their reach; so, working together we identified contributors in County Durham, Inverclyde, London and Sussex.

It was essential to convey the charity’s focus and consider the target audience throughout the entire production process, to ensure that the charity’s message is what viewers are seeing on screen. Once the different contributors had been confirmed and we received their story and background information, we created a personalised narrative structure, questions, and b-roll for the interviews to ensure we were eliciting responses that hit the brief.

We spoke with the contributors ahead of filming to make them feel comfortable, familiarise them with the crew, and we simultaneously identified natural conversational key moments from their experiences to inform our film. Our crew travelled across country to film the contributors in a documentary style in their home setting. As filming locations were so varied including inner city, countryside and by water, we captured drone footage, such as ariel shots, which we used in post-production to establish the local area ahead of introducing the interview, and transition from story to story.