How we made a TV Ad

An in-depth look into our Essex County Council Fostering services Advert 'Ready or Not'.

Essex Fostering service transforms children’s lives by placing them in safe homes with foster carers around the county. In 2020, 500 children are predicted to come into care; Essex County Council needed to plough their efforts into promoting their service to attract more foster carers.

After previously producing successful film and photography campaigns for the Council, The Fostering Service approached us to pitch ideas for a fostering awareness film. The brief was to inspire and inform people in the area to think about becoming foster carers and drive enquiries from people with the services value-based altruistic demographics.

We approach the majority of our pitches in the same way, firstly we do our research; in this case, that was finding out what drives people to foster, what could an awareness film draw on to encourage the right people to respond? What’s been done already? Was it any good and how could it be improved? We then spent some time putting together a treatment with a choice of narratives for the client to choose from.

With this project we focused on a storytelling element for the ad, we wanted to bring to life the emotions and rewards of becoming a foster carer, and sensitively  show the journey of a child in foster care.

Pitching for such a meaningful project was really exciting for the Ranch team, we genuinely believed we could really help the service make a difference to children.

We were delighted when the client confirmed the commission, and with tight time scales pre-production began straight away.

For a project like this pre-production is a sizeable task, we have a great team at Ranch who took care of the behind-the-scenes work which included client contact, casting (we cast for 2 adults and 3 children), location scouting (the film needed to take place at different locations throughout one day), licenses and scriptwriting.

The creative team started putting a narrative together based around a key reveal, driven by a montage of flashbacks; We commissioned an artist to put a storyboard together to bring each scene to life, this allowed us to share our vision of the film with the client and it gave us the opportunity to be prepared to the finest detail in advance of the shoot day. From lighting, timing, scripts and locations we could plan the day out almost to the minute (and every minute counts on shoot day) based on our thorough pre-production.

Well, they say never work with children or animals… we decided to do both! The child actors were a joy to work with, super professional and our foster family dog played along when he felt like it.

It was fantastic to have most of the Ranch crew on set for filming, our two Creative Directors, camera operator, shoot coordinator, production assistant and MUA all working to a tight schedule to get the film shot in one day.

We had a total of 5 actors (children and adults) to co-ordinate and the clients on set, so it was a full-on and exciting day.  The pre-production ensured everyone knew exactly what they were doing on the day and allowed our Directors to get everything they needed looking perfect.

At Ranch, we manage all post-production in house. From editing and colour grading to sound engineering. We have a hugely talented team working on post to make sure everything is of the highest quality. We have our own studio which again allows us to keep quality consistently high and means we can offer the client excellent production value by keeping post in house. 

Crunch time! No matter how many projects you produce (if you’re passionate about what you do) it’s always with nervous excitement that you hand over the finished product…. confidently hopeful that the client will love it as much as we do.

Essex Fostering were really delighted with the film, their feedback blew us away. Our pre-production approach had allowed us to invite the client into the creative process and be kept informed every step of the way so there were no surprises when it came to the final product.

Most importantly, the film had an extremely positive impact on the services marketing campaign, engaging viewers and helping towards a steep rise in enquiries from prospective carers.