Homestart are a charity that provide support to new parents in a safe, community environment.

As a charity, part of the work from the team involves seeking out new volunteers to help provide support to families and find funding to help as many local parents and children as possible.

We decided to film over a couple of different mornings that Homestart hold so we could collect footage to show different services they provide. Then we could cut together a few different videos as well as an overview video that could be shown to investors and volunteers, to give an idea of what Homestart do.

As a charity supporting potentially vulnerable people, I was aware to respect the privacy of the service users and that some may not want to be involved. As a father myself I was able to talk about some of the challenges of parenting and initially i met some service users without the camera equipment so they didn’t feel uncomfortable.

Everyone was very accommodating and working with the staff at Homestart we discussed together who didn’t want to appear on camera and we made sure to use framing of our images that would accommodate this.

One of the videos we filmed was a testimonial from one of the service users. Success had agreed to chat about the positive impact Homestart had had on her family life. We set the cameras up and began to have a conversation, weaving in the questions into our conversation to help Success feel comfortable. There were times when she would get emotional and as an interviewee, you know this is good content when you can see how genuinely moved someone is. At this point we stay silent. We gave Success the chance to show those emotions and she spoke from the heart. This made for a brilliant testimonial video which we cut into various edits. The main video ran around 7 minutes and we cut 30 second sound bites into horizontal and vertical video for social media use to maximise the client’s investment.