Video & Film
Always Moving
Filmmaking is vital and visceral, generating an emotional response and guaranteeing shares.
Be it filmmaking, documentary, marketing, or personal narrative – video harnesses the ability to connect people across cultures and generations. With its capacity to convey both subtle nuances and grand spectacles, video stands as a versatile and indispensable medium for sharing stories that will resonate.
It’s not just about the big budget shoots with massive crews, multiple cameras and lights everywhere (although we do love these!).
Commissioned to tell the LGMA’s story highlighting the often unseen work that Ireland’s councils perform every day on behalf of the Irish public, we produced, shot and edited two short films, each taking viewers through a 24 hour day of activity. With the productions involving over a hundred people over two weeks, we spanned the country, filming the unique and varied work that people in our council do as they ‘work for you’.
As well as great visuals, we knew each film would need a different device to bring the message to life. ‘Working For You’ has a narrator bringing us through the wide variety of work our local authorities do. ‘Every Hour, Every Day’ time stamps 24 hours of daily activity, imprinting on us how the work of the councils is so embedded in all aspects of our day-to-day lives.
Crafthub Carlow
Carlow County Council wanted a new way to showcase Carlow as a location where synergy creates opportunity for creative excellence, and a place where craft can be successfully developed with innovation and ambition at its heart. With the support of Creative Ireland, the idea for Carlow Craft Hub was born. Funded by the Creative Europe program, the hub aims to support the craft sector by promoting collaborations between designers, artists, and traditional craftspeople.
Southern were thrilled to join Carlow County Council and Creative Ireland to tell the story of this magnificent project, that has united a community and helped so many bright, creative minds to collaborate and hone their crafts. We visited many of the lovely crannies of Carlow to capture its roads and winding lanes, tow paths, mountain ways, and forest tracks that inspire such innovation across the community.
This video will be used to highlight important work of the Carlow Craft Hub as an educational resource and also to promote contemporary craft making not only in Carlow, but across Ireland and Europe and demonstrate creativity as viable career path.
Sometimes it’s about telling the smaller stories, the ordinary stories and being brave enough to let the story do the work and tell itself.
City, County & Council
Our Stories
We developed the ‘Our Stories’ project to tell the stories of contemporary Limerick – a city and county that is moving into a really exciting era of business, culture and innovation. Limerick City and County Council came on board and together, we developed the concept into three short form video series:
Our City, Our Stories Our County, Our Stories Our Council, Our Stories
The project empowered Limerick City and County Council and the people of Limerick to tell their stories – about their lives, their work and their passions, using that renowned creativity and wit only found along the Shannon side.
This was a simple and stripped back shoot driven by the great patchwork quilt of characters that Limerick consists of, keeping their stories at the very centre. Each video began with a story board and uses the same structural concept, opening and closing with colourful and engaging piece of animation of an iconic Limerick location.
Most often it’s about the real stories that are catalysts to inspire real change in our lives and our communities. The stories that are simply worth telling:
Healthy Communities
The Sláintecare Healthy Communities Programme is a cross-government initiative to reduce health inequalities in Ireland. Southern have gladly been involved in sharing the stories of how these projects have influenced our local communities and making the public more aware of the many Healthy Communities initiatives that are available to them in their locality.
The Limerick Food Partnership, and the ‘We Can Quit’ stop-smoking programme, are two such projects with very powerful stories. The Limerick Food Partnership aims to raise awareness, improve access and increase the supply of healthy food options and ‘We Can Quit’ is a free group programme for people who want support to quit smoking.
Avista HomeShare
We were delighted to work on this energising project with Avista Homeshare to encourage more people to open up their homes and become host carers to a person with a disability. We used video to capture the beautiful intricacies of what it means to care for someone like Grace in your own home and how being part of the Avista Homeshare project has been such a positive and eye opening experience for the Liston family.
For a shoot like this, the magic is in the little details that let you see a strong bond between the carer and person being cared for. The comfortable familiarity, the shared memories, the subtle smiles that can’t but shine through when Kay and John talk about Grace – are some of the powerful nuances that we really wanted to capture, to tell this story with the authenticity it deserved.
Dancer from Kyiv
When we met Nastya, a Ukrainian dancer who was who was displaced by the war, we were humbled by the very special story she had to tell and felt compelled to join her in telling it.
Nastya uses dance to tell her stories, but it’s taken her time to come back to dancing. When war broke out, dance became completely unimportant to her, her thoughts were consumed by the terror her country and people are experiencing. But Nastya has decided to shine despite the darkness around her. When she dances, she bears all. You see her pain and frustration, but you also see a newfound optimism.
“Limerick has become, for me a symbol of the return of meanings. This is my port, a city of hope and restoration.”
We followed Nastya around Limerick, her new city of “hope and restoration” and filmed an artist at work, as she danced at some prominent locations around the city. We were proud to produce this piece for her as a story worth telling.
Limerick Sports Partnership
This initiative aims to lay a foundation for positive behaviour change, introducing sport and physical activity to clients recovering from addiction, helping them to create healthier habits.
We met and recorded some inspiringly driven people, whose lives have been utterly transformed by the support that Limerick Sport’s Partnership provide to them through the Mid-West Drug and Alcohol Service. This is just one of the videos we produced to demonstrate the immensity of what the Sports Partnership support has done for so many people, residents, their families and staff alike.