Seven Years, One Brief, Sixty Films
By Leon Leenders, Video Producer
It's pre-dawn in Cardiff. We're on a canal bank with a drone, waiting for the light. In a few hours the city will fill with people and our filming window will be gone. This is for a film about a military reservist and their employer. It did not need to be this complicated. We made it this way anyway, and that instinct is what I want to talk about.
Seven years ago, when BFBS Creative was just finding its feet, Wg Cdr Simon Briggs from RAF Employer Engagement became our very first client. The brief was beautifully simple: “Capture the relationship between a military reservist and their civilian employer and show what that looks like in real life. In essence, two interviews and some b-roll.”
What followed was sixty films, shot across every corner of the UK: from medics in Glasgow and drivers in Aldergrove, to air specialists in Cambridge and mechanics in Cardiff.
Here's what producing the same story sixty times taught me.
Localised stories: how location changes the perception
When we first took the brief, we could have simply used nearby employer-reservist pairings. Just nail the format and repeat it. Instead, we pushed to reach outwards: a logistics driver at Cosford tells a fundamentally different story compared to a chef at Wittering or a medic in Scotland, even if the core message is identical.
The result is a bank of videos which speaks to people locally. We’ve seen the difference in how they’ve performed. Generic ‘locationless’ videos are less likely to be shared compared to targeted localised stories. It shows that this reservist’s experience is not a distant tale. It happens right here at your local business.
Takeaway: If you're producing a video series, think about where your audience is and the difference a localised story can make to the narrative, as well as the way the viewer perceives it. Specificity is what ties the audience to your story and what makes it feel achievable.
Build systems for handover, not just for production
What is unique about working with the military is the rhythm of role rotation: personnel move on and new leads come in. Over the years, the Employer Engagement team experienced several handovers. Each time, a new person needed to quickly trust us, understand what we'd built together, and feel confident continuing it.
We learnt to treat those transitions as a production challenge in its own right. We maintained careful documentation, built a clear archive, and were proactive about onboarding new stakeholders rather than waiting to be asked.
Takeaway: In any long-term client relationship, your knowledge and experience is what makes you unique. Document it and share it generously when personnel change. The relationship outlasts the individuals.
The brief is the floor, not the ceiling
The original format (employer interview, reservist interview, b-roll) was a solid foundation, but we did not let it become a limitation.
Over the years, we pushed the narrative in every direction we could. We planned an elaborate pre-sunrise drone operation in Cardiff. In communication with the Principality Stadium, we built a drone plan over the river to capture the building, the castle, and the city without risking us flying over pedestrians.
