Erskine's Stewart Melville Schools
At the start of 2018 we began a partnership with ESMS, currently one of the largest Independent Schools in Europe, for a period of 9 months in order to update their promotional content for the three schools under their ESMS brand – Stewart’s Melville College, The Mary Erskine School and ESMS Junior School.
Our engagement included interviews with the Head Teachers, subject teachers, as well as content to sit in frames of their website. We also joined pupils and teachers on field trips around Edinburgh and for their annual camp in the Cairngorm mountains. in 2019 we also produced a series of digital signage adverts which were used on digital advertising boards in the city of Edinburgh.
“The films are first-class. Good, balanced, varied content and a great reflection of school life”
– David Gray, Principal
Our approach
The boards beneath show our initial creative ideas and how we pitched the delivery of this film project.
As part of our proposal we researched a broad selection of existing Scottish primary and secondary school films in order to inform our approach and shape our proposal to the ESMS team. Deliverables included a single overarching ESMS film combining elements from each of the three schools with on-screen messaging to deliver a strong sense of the school life at ESMS. Meanwhile the individual school films were each based on a mix of interview content cut against footage from around the schools to give a much deeper insight into the life of each of the schools which make up ESMS.
“Brilliant to work with you on these films. I have a great deal of respect for the work you and Simon do and the films
look great on the site! Thank you!” – Hazel Sellar, Marketing Manager
How we made it
Working with any organisation of this size, taking time to really get to grips with the sector is hugely important for us and understanding what kind of engagement works best, who and what we’d have access to and how best to approach delivery of the brief with minimal disruption to the business of the school. Following the pre-production meetings with ESMS we met with some of the teaching staff and begun photographing key locations on the sites from where we could begin the creative process. Initially producing high-level storyboards for each of the films in order to visual, as much as possible, the films we were proposing for production.
