Woodbridge School

Woodbridge School is renowned as one of East Anglia’s most historic and progressive independent schools. Placing equal emphasis on acute learning, personal development, and community spirit, they have a vision to create proactive, responsible free-thinkers with the knowledge, skills and self-belief to fulfil all their potential.

To support their refreshed brand, new website and admissions campaign, Woodbridge needed an asset that could sum up the experience at the School in just a few seconds, and in a memorable way. We decided to create a fresh, invigorating piece of video to both capture attention and invite further enquiry.

The purpose of the project was to feed a social media campaign and drive interaction around the planned Autumn open day event. The brief was to create a visually striking video that was different to any other examples in the education sector. It had to be abstract. It had to be engaging. It had to be shareable. And from a content point of view, it need to show:
• The history: With its origins in the 16th century, the School’s heritage dates back centuries, with a rich archive of photographs
• The values: In workshops with the School’s staff, we refined their contemporary values to: character, kindness, community and excellence
• The curriculum: Showcasing wide-spanning curriculum provides opportunities to fulfil every pupil’s potential, whatever their talents, traits and aptitudes
• The students: Developing ‘proactive, responsible free-thinkers who go out into the world with the knowledge, skills and self-belief to become everything they are meant to be.’

The first task was to ideate the creatives before moving to recording footage. We drew inspiration from a variety of sources, looked for techniques and styles that could feed into the brief and bring the imagination to life, most notably in this case Adobe’s ‘the world is your canvas’ campaign and Nike’s ‘you can’t stop us’ advertisement. The creation of the entire video involved:
• Research: Created using a mixture of Hyperlapse and Tracking in 3D Space, everything – from how we filmed to how we edited this effect – eveything changed after our initial test
• Choreography: The main complexity was co-ordinating what the movements were going to be in each shot and how we were going to link them all together
• R&D: As some of the techniques were new and conceptual we needed to experiment and break down how to shoot them before running tests to check that the technique would work
• Expertise: We combining different approaches, including: Hyperlapse, photo manipulation and animation, 3D camera tracking, overhead rig (BTS Photos), drone footage, After Effects, Photoshop and Premier Pro.