The Fresh Air Leadership Company

The brief

The Fresh Air Leadership Company takes leadership and team development out of the meeting room. Its formats range from a short walk with a few people to the Business TriVenture, a full day of cycling, canoeing and walking, with the team effectiveness work happening while everyone is moving rather than in a session afterwards.

That creates a specific selling problem. The product is a day, and a day cannot be photographed, listed or described in a way that conveys what it is like to be there. A prospective client reading about inquiry-based team development outdoors has to take it on trust. The same client watching four minutes of it does not.

Four separate offers needed covering: the TriVenture, the business micro-adventures, the team development days, and Canoe Conversations. Each had to work alone, because a prospect arrives on one page and not the others, while sitting together as a set on the same website.

The approach

I filmed and edited all four. The films run between eighty three seconds and three minutes eleven, which is long by the standards of promotional video and deliberate in every case. A thirty second cut can establish that a group of people went outside together. It cannot show the difference between the group that set off in the morning and the group that came back, and that difference is the entire product.

The hard part is that the thing being sold is conversation, and conversation is the first casualty of a camera. Point a lens at two people talking and they either stop or start performing. Most of the usable material came from staying far enough back that the group forgot the camera was working, then closing in only once something was genuinely underway.

Each format sets a different problem. A canoe means everything is moving, nothing can be set down, and the light coming off the water changes the exposure between one paddle stroke and the next. A three discipline day means three different paces and three different sets of safe positions to shoot from, with the camera needing to be in place before anything happens rather than after. A team development day has no finish line at all: the moment worth having is usually the pause after an exercise, when somebody says the thing they had not planned to say.

The films were kept to one day each rather than assembled from several. A prospective client is trying to picture their own team in the footage, and a single day told properly does that better than a montage of many.

The outcome

The set covers the range rather than the flagship, which is the more useful outcome commercially. A company with one film has something to show the people who already asked. A company with four has an answer for whichever offer a prospect happens to be interested in, and the shortest of them explains the whole idea in under ninety seconds.

The work also sits across two things that are usually kept apart. The client is corporate and the buyer is a business, but what is on screen is people on bikes, in canoes and on hills, which is a different filming discipline from a conference room. That combination is the reason this work exists.

The thinking behind it is set out in the journal: Team Building Video.