One of the primary goals of Bold Content is to help give voice to inspiring individuals that people would otherwise not be aware of. One of the most inspirational of those people we have had the privilege of meeting and documenting is Preeti Gupta. This female Indian entrepreneur has worked unbelievably hard to build a business which supports her family and provides an invaluable service to her local community.
Background to the Preeti Gupta Video
We have been working with Coca-Cola for over three years and have created ten documentaries for them around the world and edited more than twenty. We have taken on the role of content managers for their sustainability initiatives and were recently named as their ‘worldwide center of excellence for content creation’.
5by20 is a worldwide program supported by Coca-Cola whose mission is the empowerment of five million business women by the year 2020. Each of the woman supported by the program are in same way related to Coca-Cola’s business. We were asked to document one of the recipients of that support, a female business woman Preeti Gupta living in India.
The Production
Preeti Gupta lives in a village called Nagrasata in Agra, India. There she operates a small convenience store. Nagarasata is very much a rural village with a limited electricity supply. Preeti wanted to stay open later at night so that she could continue to service her customers.
In order to do this she required a solar powered light which would collect enough energy to stay open at night. This same solar panel would also provide the hard working people of Nagarsata with a place where they could get chilled drinks and recharge their phones.
Through the 5by20 program Coca-Cola supplied the solar panel that made this possible. They also provided Preeti with training and support to help her run her business successfully. What Preeti did with that support is what makes this story so inspirational. Starting work at 4am and frequently walking miles during the scorching hot midday sun to get supplies, she has made her convenience store a success. We travelled to India to capture her story on film.
You can see Preeti Gupta’s story here:
Based on the success of the first film we had created eighteen months previously we flew back to Northern India to film a follow up piece. Because of the contacts that we made whilst we were out there before we were able to rapidly assemble an Indian crew and fly them to Agra. They shot the documentary on Wednesday March 5th and by Saturday March 8th we had a completed, colour corrected, documentary with an originally composed soundtrack which had been through several rounds of feedback from the Sustainability team in Atlanta.
You can see Preeti Gupta’s follow up film here:
The Result
The second video went out on Coca-Cola’s corporate homepage and their Facebook page on the Saturday which was International Women’s Day and had a great response from their Facebook fans. This was a particularly high-pressure project with a tight deadline but we are proud to say that our team handled it well and despite the fact that we didn’t get much sleep that week, we were really pleased with the results. Coca-Cola were really impressed as they are not used to doing things with such a quick turnaround.