Songtime CIC

Songtime CIC got in touch with us as they were originally just planning for us to take some updated photos for their website. After chatting through with Paul and Angela, the directors of Songtime, however, we came to the conclusion that it would really help benefit their social media presence as well as their website if we also created some videos explaining a little more about what they do. 

Pre-production and Planning

We got to work on planning the best way to capture everything we needed before the shoot. Songtime CIC currently has 2 sessions, one on Monday in Mansfield, and a second one in Wollaton on a Tuesday. We decided the best way to capture the whole process was to film both sessions in order to capture as much b-roll as possible and really give the best demonstration of what the sessions involve. We also planned to do an interview with Angela on the Tuesday session, so we got to work on creating a series of questions to run through!

Capturing the Content

Starting with the first day at the Mansfield Sessions, we setup 2 cameras to give us as much coverage as possible. We made sure to check with all attendees first that they were happy to be filmed and photographed before recording, which thankfully everyone was! We also setup a microphone on Angela in order to capture moments that would come in useful for the later edits.

We'd planned quite a lot of the ideas of shots we wanted in the pre-production process, but it was nice to be able to capture the interactions and funny moments as they occurred naturally in the session, a lot of which made it to the edit! Having 2 cameras also meant that nothing was missed when swapping between photo and video too.

Day 2 was very similar to the first in many ways, however, this time there was one table of people who preferred not to be filmed or photographed. This wasn't a problem as we managed to setup the cameras and plan our shots in such a way to not include them. Also at this Wollaton session we planned to do the interview segment with Angela, so just before the session we grabbed a quiet room to run through all the questions. Again, we used 2 cameras for this as it made it seamless to edit between the two, but more on that later!

Post Production and Editing

The post production process involved a little more planning as we had so much footage to go through. Thankfully, as we'd planned out most of the shots that we wanted before the shoot, it made it easier to search through the footage and find what we needed to bring the story together.

The interview with Angela was the most important part, as it was her words that brought everything together to tell Songtime CIC's story. Originally, we had planned to have a long form video of 4-6 minutes, however we decided in the editing process it would be better to split the videos into smaller sections, as this would give Songtime CIC a series of videos they could release, and it also made more sense for the content, stopping it from being too long and not as engaging.

The Results

The videos have been well received on social media, and Songtime are planning to use their photos and videos on the upcoming new website, which will be linked here when it goes live!

Here's a few kind words from Angela, one of the directors of Songtime:

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"The Videos are lovely! Pickering Street Studios have made a brilliant job of that. It looks like our sessions are full of laughter - I love that!"

See the videos and photos below for examples of what we delivered!