Mint Technology – 10 Year Anniversary
THE CHALLENGE...
Mint Technology came to us with a milestone worth marking. Ten years in business, and they wanted to thank the clients, partners, and suppliers who'd been part of the journey. They'd taken over the Black Country Living Museum for the night, brought in a comedian, and laid on an evening built entirely around the people in the room. Their brief to us was clear and unusual. No interviews, no structured pieces to camera, no asking anyone to perform. They wanted us to disappear into the background and catch what the night actually felt like. The conversations, the laughter, the side-of-the-room moments where two people who'd worked together for years finally got to share a drink. Anniversaries are easy to film badly. You end up with a montage that could belong to anyone. The challenge was making a film that felt unmistakably like this company, this room, and these people, without ever interrupting the night to do it.
THE SOLUTION...
We stripped the kit right back. A two-person crew, one on stills, one on a gimbal, no lighting rigs, no extra footprint. Working with the natural light from the venue forced us to slow down, read the room, and pick our positions for composition rather than relying on any setup. That was the point. The lighter we travelled, the easier it was to fade into the background and let people forget we were there, which is when the real moments came out. In the edit, music carried the spine of the film, and the track was chosen carefully so the lyrics earned their place rather than sat over the top. We kept pockets of live sound from the night woven through it, particularly the laughter, so the film never lost the feeling of being in the room. The result is genuinely emotional by the end, and it works because nothing about the night was staged for a camera.
