Circesteem

Director | Melissa Fox | Editor | Phillip Batta

Overview

Since 2001, CircEsteem’s mission has been to unite youth from diverse racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds and help them build self-esteem and mutual respect through the practice of circus arts. They came to us wanting to create a short film for a fundraiser and to use on their website. 

Production

To keep our budget low we tried to get as much impact out of CircEsteem's rich archive as possible. For this reason our edit contains photography of performances throughout the years. Our first cut for the fundraiser was very different than the one you see here. This project helped us learn the importance of scripting. After the fundraiser our client felt that we were still missing the heart of the organization. Our first cuts did not have a story, rather they had a voice over created and performed by one of the parents. While the writing was good, using a parent versus a student did't have the impact we wanted. Our client agreed that was the wrong direction and asked us to add in a new story. Enter our subject. She changed the entire film and helped give it the heart it was missing. Hear the impact of this organization through the eyes of one of it's graduates.

Results

This film is still being used on social media and on our client's site to promote the program. We learned a ton on this project and used those learns to implement new ways of drafting stories in pre-production for all our clients.