Editing from existing footage isn’t our number-one-favourite-ever way of working, but when a friend asks for help…

Bryan Miller not long ago joined Trees for Cities’ board of Trustees, and the charity urgently needed a short film to support their applications to potential corporate partners. Filming wasn’t possible in the timescale, but we wrote the script (which had a lot to achieve in a short time) and put together a video what they – and we – had to hand. Which included the voice artist (Anna). I expect some of you will recognise the dulcet tones as they have featured on many, many guide voiceover tracks over the years.

Not so long ago, working with library footage could be really painful, and honestly we did our best to avoid it: it was often poor quality, shot on hand-held video cameras, could arrive in a number of different formats, be difficult to transcode… a big headache. But these days, pretty much everything is shot on DSLR, and even if the picture composition and framing isn’t exactly as we’d do it ourselves, the quality is more than adequate and the files are digital and rarely problematic.

This little film can be easily customised in the opening and closing titles to include the name of the business that Trees for Cities are pitching to. We hope they’ll get loads of value from it.