Four hundred million children with a reading deficiency

Nearly four hundred million children all over the world possess insufficient reading or writing skills. Children’s rights organisation Save the Children has launched a campaign to raise awareness of the importance of children learning to read and write properly. Brandcode partnered with Spinner & Langkous to produce an impressive opening video for this campaign.

“Video footage alone is not enough. The video editors then face the challenge of telling the entire story in under one minute.”

Jimmy Thepass
Photo / Videographer

Concept development

Spinner & Langkous came up with the concept, which Brandcode then helped them develop further and execute. We constructed a real maze on location. As an experiment, we had two teams of children walk the maze: team A could read the instructions and team B couldn’t. Our goal was to demonstrate the – literal and figurative – obstacles that children face in life if they don’t know how to read.

Preparation and construction

We were able to cast a fun group of children using Save the Children’s network and our own environment. We selected the Fokker Terminal in The Hague as the location for our maze. The industrial look of the hall and its large hangar doors are perfect for our experiment. We then designed the maze and the path leading through it and created appropriate designs for the readable and unreadable signage.

Recording day with the children

On the morning of our day of shooting, everyone got together at the Fokker Terminal. Spinner & Langkous handled the presentation and the atmosphere, while Brandcode was in charge of direction and camera operation. We were able to shoot all the footage we needed using stairs, a drone, a crane and an experienced camera crew. We also provided entertainment for the children in between takes.

You can watch the “making of” video here.

Video editing

After the shoot, we took on the major challenge of telling the entire story in under one minute. With sleek editing and a catchy musical score, we managed to produce a video with a powerful message!

Watch the video on YouTube here.

Sharing on social media

Save the Children shared the video on its social medial channels. Fortunately, the reactions were overwhelmingly positive! We delivered the video in various formats for use on social media. Portrait for the “stories” and square for Instagram. After two weeks of successful visibility, Save the Children also asked us to create an even shorter version of the video to give its campaign another boost.

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