Clare Balding Amazon HQ Event
THE CHALLENGE...
Auris Tech and Fonetti came to us with a simple ask and a story that was harder to hold than it looked. They wanted the world to understand the National Read-Aloud Challenge and what it does for children, and they wanted Clare Balding, their brand ambassador, to be the one to tell it. We were filming at the awards day inside Amazon's London HQ, where Clare was interviewing the winning children and presenting their awards. The real difficulty was capturing the thing that makes the whole campaign matter. The impact shows up as a quiet confidence in a child as they step up on stage to collect an award, and it happens in a window so small you could blink and miss it. Our job was to make the film hold onto that moment, so anyone watching could feel the change for themselves rather than just be told about it.
THE SOLUTION...
Filming inside Amazon HQ meant working around tight security, and that left us with one spot to shoot from, facing one direction, with very little say over the framing. So we put our energy into what we could control. We kept the setup deliberately simple and let a single light do the work, shaping it with care rather than flooding the room. To bring a little life into the background, we moved a few cushions in for colour and depth, then ran a clean two-camera angle with Clare speaking straight to the lens. The restraint was the whole point. Nothing in the shot competed with what Clare was saying, so her words about the children and what she witnessed that day carried the film from start to finish.
