Client
Cottee Parker Architects

Style
Brand Film | Documentary | Company Culture | Interview Style

The Brief

Competing for talent and finding new ways to attract design-savvy creatives is an ambitious goal in the architecture and construction industry. When Cottee Parker Architects approached us to help create a short recruitment film for their new website, we knew it would be a highly involved partnership between a large number of stakeholders, each with a vested interest in the future direction of the practice.

To ensure the narrative resonated with each team, local geographic market, and service stream within the organisation, each was represented equally in the footage. Our challenge was to bring together the voices of over 20 team members featured and maintain a consistent visual and audio character in just over two minutes of screen time.

In producing a new video asset in anticipation of the practice’s future recruitment campaigns and ahead of their website redesign, we also needed to help shape the brands’ future cinematic style for short-form video content.

Finding the Interesting

Rather than approaching production through scripting and talent casting, we worked with Cottee Parkers’ Marketing and P&C team to unpack the ‘why’ behind the longevity of designers’ careers at the practice, and their motivations for sticking with the company for the long haul.

We developed these motivations into our content pillars in a series of detailed scene-planning workshops. Using these themes as our guiding pillars, our team undertook one-one-one audio interviews with over 20 team members, developing a targeted set of questions to prompt casual, anecdotal and authentic conversation with each individual.

The content pillars were a guide in sifting through almost 40 hours of interviews. In post-production, stitching audio together to form a single voice and storytelling device throughout the film created a unified character that communicated Cottee Parkers’ compelling messaging. Supported by B-roll footage of the design team ‘in situ’ at the studio and across a number of in-construction and completed project locations empowered us to deliver a consistent narrative – both in the audio and visual.

Undertaking audio interviews with the team both on location and remotely enabled us to manage our client’s budget in an economical way, minimising the cost of travelling to all six studios in Australia and New Zealand.

Creative Output

The film we created for Cottee Parker highlights the culture of the organisation beyond the walls of the studio. It sparks a compelling tale for prospective employees, positioning the employee experience at the centre of the practice’s culture, and firmly sets the design firm apart from its closest competitors.