Recently, we’re asked to help a local community organization keep their doors open post the Corona virus closure. The Elderday Santa Cruz serves the entire county and had almost 70 participants from age 40-100 in their day center. The programs allow people to stay in their homes and receive wonderful and necessary services for seniors, veterans and others in need in our community. The center had to close their doors temporarily during the COVID-19 outbreak to follow public health guidelines and has continued to support people with home activities and phone calls. It’s a been a very difficult time for all involved. So for this quick video project we focused on one sweet elderly couple, Elsie and Peter.
If things were not bad enough, now the State of California is threatening to make budget cuts and this would essentially close down Elderday for good. This would be terrible for all the people who work and attend the center. Community Bridges is the non-profit that manages this center and they asked us to help them quickly create an impactful support video to help save the center from closure!
For this video, we went to the home of Elsie and Peter to document their personal story and capture a glimpse into their daily lives since the virus hit. Peter suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and since he has stopped going to Elderday, his lovely wife has already experienced a decline in his condition. We interviewed Peter, but his condition made it so difficult for him to share about it all.
Later that same day we met John, a social worker at Elderday to share his story about what they do, the impact they have an the possible closure. He was candid and the off-camera interview style worked to capture it all. We also shot one direct to camera appeal video to the Governor, watch below.
Community Bridges and Elderday will be sending out the video shortly and the whole project was completed in just over one week, since the timeline was tight to raise critical awareness. They have posted the video to their Youtube channel and will share it via email to thousands of followers and on their social media channels to raise needed support, outreach and impact the state’s decision to close down.
Videos like these are why we exist, to leverage the power of the human voice, image and movement to share a perspective and a positive impact in our local community. Who knows how far reaching this could be. Please consider a video like this for your own business, organization or a non-profit you deeply respect and admire to have more of an impact.
In the below video, we also had John make a direct appeal to the California Governor, Gavin Newsom to help keep the doors of Elderday Santa Cruz open. By having John look directly at the camera and having him imagine speaking to just the Governor, it feels much more personal and intimate. We wanted this effect to be impactful and yet also short, at one minute. We decided not to use b-roll (aka cut-away footage) while he was speaking to also keep the intimate 1:1 feeling stronger. It is a video style technique and can be used for the right purpose needed in the appeal of the video.
Are you interested in making a video like this for your company, business, organization or community group? If so, book a complimentary media strategy with us to learn more here:
