MarketInvoice

Founder Film

Most business people are familiar with Simon Sinek’s theory of Start With Why.  People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.  With this philosophy permeating brand values internationally, it amazes me that more brands are not investing in founder films.  It’s a great way to enable your customers to connect more deeply with the brand.  It all started somewhere and if it started with a passionate individual or group of individuals then that’s a compelling story.  Growing a business is hard and how the founder overcame those inevitable obstacles makes a great foundation for emotional storytelling.  This is the most powerful and most memorable type of story you can tell so we were delighted when MarketInvoice came to us and asked us to create a film about their founder Anil Stocker.

Founder films are also a great way to communicate your brand values to your intended audience.  We knew that MarketInvoice act as a trusted partner to the businesses they work with

Our process was to interview Anil over Skype to find out his story, then we interviewed their brand manager to determine which marketing messages needed to come through clearly in the film.  One of our talented writers then got to work on a first draft of the film.  After client feedback we had a script that we were all pretty happy with but we knew we didn’t want Anil to sound like he was reading a script.  Because he’s not a trained presenter we knew this would be inevitable if we used an autocue or fed him lines to read so when we got to set (a Studio in East London) we decided to do one run through of the scripted dialogue followed by the Director asking him questions in a relaxed and conversational manner. Those questions were steered towards getting the dialogue we required and resulted in a reading that felt natural and within Anil’s usual cadence of speaking.   We used the scripted dialogue for 99% of the edit.  Only if there was a line that needed precise phrasing did we ever have to cut into the scripted reading.

The interview took just over four hours which left us with half a day to gather the B-roll which you see in the film.  It was a lot to pack into a day but we managed to organise locations that were close together meaning that we could maximise our filming time.

We edited over a week, including time for the client to give feedback and test their creative ideas to define the best way of telling the story.