Telling the story of comprehensive care: a CHS case study

Our second favourite thing at Newcast is telling stories – our favourite thing is having a brief that allows us the freedom to be creative.

Canberra Health Services are a longtime client of ours, and came to us recently for a new video project: a short film that tells the story of comprehensive care, following a patient's journey from start to finish.

What made us happy was that CHS came to us with an open brief – while they had an idea for the storyline, the goals and the audience, the brief was open to interpretation in terms of final output.

Initially CHS came to us with inspiration from a hand-drawn video explainer they had seen online, the kind of video where a voice over narrates the story while a person hand draws the scenes on white paper, usually in black and white, and usually sped up.

We liked the idea of an illustrated explainer, but after an initial consultation, decided that this style was pretty dated and did not match the modern message and branding that CHS like to project to the public.

Instead, we offered up two alternatives; firstly – a modern-style illustrated explainer utilising iconography and character animation to tell the story, with voice over, sound effects and music, that matches their message and branding more accurately; and secondly – a live action narrative using actors in real settings to tell the story of comprehensive care.

CHS supplied us with a voice over script for narration, and based off of that, we developed 2 different storyboards for both an animated video and a live action one. We also supplied them with pre-existing example videos, and other photographs and materials we sourced online of the various styles, colours and textures that each option would look like once it was produced.

Once they had looked through these options, we came to a decision to go ahead with the live action version. We thought this was a great idea for many reasons – firstly, it's much easier to get an audience to connect with live action as they are real people in realistic scenarios. On top of that, because you have a real person talking to you about their story, it's much easier to relate.

Secondly, we thought that by doing live action, we would be able to film in and showcase the facilities at Canberra Hospital and the University of Canberra Hospital.

And thirdly, live action is actually easier to produce. While animation can be seen as an easier option in some cases, this kind of story would have actually taken a lot more time and money to produce as it was more narrative-driven, rather than an explainer or infographic where icons can represent the message you're trying to communicate.

Once the script and storyboard was approved, we put together a production schedule and run-sheet for the project, scheduling in 2 shooting days across the two hospitals to film.

We booked in an actor, Dion Devow, thanks for our friends at Victoria's Models. We also had nursing staff ready to volunteer as extras for the duration of the shoot.

Shoot day 1 was at the University of Canberra Hospital – where it played the part of the Emergency Department and various other locations at Canberra Hospital. Shooting a narrative video can be relatively difficult when it comes to continuity, various locations, and lighting.

With limited time with our talent, we opted for a 2 camera shoot, one for wide shots and one for close-ups, going through the scenes as naturally as possible so our nurses would feel the most comfortable.

We used both our incredible Sony FX9 with Fujinon lenses, which is a beast when it comes to shooting, and also an FS5 stripped back and strapped to a stabiliser, so we could utilise it in POV shots and give our camera operators the freedom to jump onto moving hospital beds and the like to get the shots we wanted.

While we used the same room over and over to represent different rooms, we utilised lighting, moved props around, and experimented with different white balances to make the rooms seem different in each scene.

We also did the piece to camera in the UC Hospital courtyard in an attempt to give it a home-y feel that ties the story together at the end. Using a lens with shallow depth-of-field allowed for us to keep the background out of focus so the viewer could focus on Dion’s story.

Then it was editing time – the first cut was easy as we had a pre-prepared script and storyboard so it was all laid out already.

Then as always we took our time to master the video – including graphics, exposure control, colour-grade and sound levels. There was virtually no changes as the video had been so well planned ahead of time, so CHS were very happy with the final result.

See the full video below, and work with us today.