We were contacted by Stonyhurst International School to create a video about their new campus in Penang. This brief gave us a unique creative challenge: how do you tell the story of a school that is still under construction?

As resourceful and fun-loving creatives, we see limitations as an opportunity and challenge to think outside the box.

We started by brainstorming various ideas, such as the possibility of using arts & crafts, or miniatures to build a replica of the school. This led us to wander: what if we filmed the students working on an art project together? That way we could illustrate Stonyhurst’s story and their pupil-centered values in a fun and engaging manner through the art project. Being a Jesuit school, our client was also afraid that they would be perceived as too “religious”. So this angle was a good way to portray their values without seeming dogmatic.
From there, we began to craft the setting. But first, we needed to find an artist who could draw what the students would be “drawing”. ‍

We found Novia Shin, an artist based in KL, through a friend who works at Hin Bus. With Novia’s watercolour and youthful aesthetics, she was the perfect candidate to draw the “storyboards”. We began brainstorming with Novia on what to draw and in which scenes we would showcase the school values. Using the colour-coded values depicted on the school prospectus, we tried to integrate them onto a scene where students were co-creating in a symbolic learning landscape: some groups of students wore blue, others red, and so on.

After finalising the storyboard with our client, we printed 64-feet-long worth of drawings in A0 size. We also commissioned a carpenter to construct a roller to hold the drawing scroll.

For our set-up, we rigged a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4k for a top-down tabletop shoot and several high power LEDs as ceiling bounce lights for clean colours.

During our rehearsal with the students, we determined where to position them on the table based on their artistic capabilities, coordinated a person in charge of rolling out the scroll, andsolidified the entire choreography.

Initially, we wanted to shoot in one-take as we only had 3 rolls of drawings to film. However, we later discovered that it was difficult for the students to follow the timing as the scroll was heavy to pulland the narration was a bit too fast.

Our solution was to introduce a 10-second hold between each scene. This made our work a lot smoother as it was easier to time the narrative with the movement of the scroll. The entire shoot took us abouttwo days: one for the rehearsal and another for the actual shoot.

This was one of the projects where the editing was more a breeze since the bulk of work was done in filming. All we had to do was cut out the paused moments and add a touch of colour grading.