demi

About demi

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GM21_5

Green Man

We’ve long been lovers of Green Man Festival – we think it’s been Wales’ best music festival for 20 years. So when they asked us to work with them on creating their Festival Highlights and Live Session films in 2018, we obviously jumped at the chance. We’ve been their go to video production company ever since.

Every year we combine our in-house team with a rabble of talented freelancers, creating a large team capable of covering all major aspects of the festival.

We split into two teams: the first shoots the highlights film. On the surface this may look like we send out a couple of camera ops and let them shoot what they want. In actual fact, it’s a tight operation pulling together Green Man’s most popular acts and events in an almost minute by minute schedule. The challenge is always making sure we capture enough beauty shots of the festival and surrounding landscape while the sun is shining – sometimes an elusive shot to capture in Wales’ Brecon Beacons!

The second team shoots the Green Man Sessions, a series of 18 + live performances shot over the weekend at the Green Man Record Store Tent. These sometimes secret acts see the cream of the Green Man crop playing a short, intimate show. We shoot with two camera operators, directed by a live editor over comms. Live sound is captured by sound engineer and producer extraordinaire Steffan Pringle, who mixes and masters the 18 tracks post-festival. Check out the Wet Leg’s session that has had nearly 1,000,000 views on YouTube.

The days following the festival see our editors hunkering down to put together the initial highlights film in just a couple of days, so that Green Man can share the results with festival goers and their huge social media following. Seeing the responses from people on social media always gets us tearing up.

The next days go toward the many session edits; though live-edited in situ, there will be the odd shot that needs re-cutting before we give each session a stylish grade. Once mixes and edits are complete, we supply Green Man with a range of clips for us on socials too, to drip feed to the Green Man family.

“Green Man has been working with On Par for many years now. Year-on-year, they approach every brief with fresh energy, creativity and dynamism and foster a close and collaborative working relationship from planning stage all the way through to delivery. Each member of the On Par team is knowledgeable, professional and friendly and they can be trusted to deliver fantastic content” – Green Man

 

WGSHELTER

Welsh Government

We were asked to produce two 30 second TV commercials and campaign photography for a joint project between Shelter Cymru and the Welsh Government. Cardiff and Bristol-based advertising agency SBW came to us with two concepts highlighting how someone could easily find themselves homeless and how they could reach out to Shelter Cymru for help. The commercials were to have a documentary feel to heighten the sense of realism.

The two commercials feature characters who, after becoming homeless, seek help from Shelter Cymru. Alan’s Story features a man who lost his home after being made redundant. Sarah’s Story features a woman and her daughter who became homeless after suffering domestic abuse. The storyboard showed the pair moving from house to house after Sarah was bombarded with abusive text messages from her partner. The idea was to then rewind to an earlier point in the video and story, ‘intervening’ before things went too far downhill for Sarah. At this point she calls Shelter Cymru instead of letting her housing situation get out of hand and the pair move into a new home.

We shot everything handheld to help add to the documentary feel and used multiple locations to give a sense that Sarah was constantly moving around. We loved SBW’s storyboard, but our first challenge was to think of a way to show the film rewinding without being cheesy – queue Benny Hill music. So we tweaked the storyboard to include specific scenes that would look good once playing backwards and that would make it clear that the film was rewinding. One of these scenes involved Sarah getting upset and shedding a single tear, which would then roll back up her cheek in reverse – easier said than done!

Help-01
Help-02

With this scene we learned that shedding a single, movie-worthy tear is a big ask for an actor. Fortunately, our hair and makeup artist was able to source eye drops that did most of the hard work, but the challenge then was to get the perfect tear – not a raging torrent, but something big enough – and at the right speed. For such a short scene, it took a while to get right, but it was worth the effort – it worked perfectly, in both directions.

As this was a bilingual campaign, we made two versions of each commercial: one in Welsh and one in English. Overall we feel the commercials are emotionally impactful and do what we set out to do. SBW, Shelter Cymru and the Welsh Government were all happy with the results.

Please also check out Alan’s Story, the other film in this series.

HIDDEN HOMELESSNESS

Shelter Cymru

We worked with marketing and advertising agency SBW, for Shelter Cymru’s #hiddenhomelessness campaign to help raise awareness of young people sofa surfing, and encourage them to reach out and get help.

The film needed to be pacey and believable with a clear, strong story that would connect with the target audience of 16-24 year olds. We created a Welsh / English bilingual TV Commercial that places the viewer in the shoes of someone who is hidden homeless, which  was specifically achieved by shooting in a POV style… we needed some serious kit to pull it off.

The film was shown on TV with lots of targeting done through Sky Adsmart, S4C and All4 – and the advert ended up winning a Drum Roses Creative Award!

As part of the campaign we also created a series of short documentaries – emotive case studies – that tell the stories of real people’s experiences of being hidden homeless. These films were used across social media as part of the online campaign reach.

A bilingual Spotify ad was also produced, using voiceover from the TV Commercial. The width and breadth of content produced was made possible by the talents of our in-house team, who make it possible for us to provide full video production services.

The campaign delivered some exciting, tangible results – not only meeting the SMART objectives, but surpassing them:

  • Nearly 60,000 visits to the campaign website (against the target of 50,000 visitors)
  •  3,195 conversions (320% result against the 1,000 goal)
  • 3 million overall impressions from the search and display ads alone (2.8 million of which fell within the 18-24 target audience)
  • The social media strategy delivered just over 5 million impressions, reaching nearly 1.9 million people between 1st January and 24th March
SHAPE-YOUR-STORY

NHS Trust

Since the Covid pandemic we’ve made a number of recruitment films for various NHS health boards.

We worked with Cardiff and Bristol-based advertising agency, SBW, to produce one hero film and four hub films for Barts Health Board in London, aimed at recruiting more critical care nurses. The concept of the hero film was to hear real nurses’ voices over portrait shots and footage of them at work on their wards.

Although none of these films were intended to act as television commercials, we wanted to put as much of the budget as we could on screen, which meant hiring in the same high-end camera and lenses as we would for a commercial.

This kind of equipment generally calls for a larger crew, but we had to keep ours to an absolute minimum for this shoot, not only for the budget’s sake but also due to the nature of filming in real hospitals – you just can’t cart a large film crew around a working hospital during the tail end of a pandemic.

We also needed to be nimble; nurses are busy people so we had to shoot when and where we could. We’d set up for our interviews and wait on tenterhooks for our nurses to arrive, only to find out they’d been called to an emergency. Understandably, this is part of the day-to-day when working with on-duty NHS staff.

The other major challenge of shooting in London hospitals was the scale of the city: shooting in two hospitals a day, for two days, plus travel between locations and loading in and out of the hospitals meant every second counted – luckily our combined experiences of documentary filmmaking allowed us to be quick to respond and find time-efficient creative solutions.

As we made a number of films for this project, we split post-production between editors, with one editor tackling the hero film and the other working on the four hub films. The SBW creative team wanted the hub films to have a “story book” feel and start with a photo album opening to reveal moving pictures of the nurses and their hospital.

Despite the challenges of working in real hospitals in London with only a small crew, talking with the nurses was a humbling experience and we feel privileged to have been involved in this project for the NHS.

 

THE-ATTO

Austin Cycles

Branding & Web Design Agency Limegreentangerine approached us to produce a bunch of content for Austin Cycles who needed a bunch of social content for their amazing carbon fibre folding bike: The Atto. They wanted to show how it’s light, fun and fast!

London had been discussed as a location for shooting, but we explained to Austin Cycles that Cardiff provides a host of nearby diverse locations, meaning we could get more shot in a shorter space of time. With On Par being a Cardiff-based Production Company, another pro is that we get very good rates for shooting in public spaces – sometimes absolutely free.

Style and shooting-wise, we needed some dynamic movement in the videos to reflect the product, so we got in touch with Mighty Sky, Wales’ finest camera stabilisation team, who provided a camera car and a buggy cam.

So on an extremely sunny day in November (lucky us) we set out to capture some beautifully smooth footage featuring some excellent models, who helped to create the fun vibe we were after.

Our most impressive location was Cardiff Barrage at sunset: normally shut to motor vehicles, we were able to arrange for the camera car to have access so we could capture the stunning shots that feature in the BTS. They really show how nimble these bikes are.


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