Promotional video production
This case study of an artists promotional video features Pedro da Costa Felgueiras. Pedro is a historical artist and was commissioned by The Strawberry Hill Trust to re-create the historic paint finishes at Strawberry Hill House during a recent restoration. This artists promotional video features the story behind this historic process.
Strawberry Hill House
Strawberry Hill House is a gothic fantasy located just outside London. It was created by Horace Walpole in the 18th century and is internationally famous as Britain’s finest example of Georgian Gothic revival architecture. For Pedro, the creative highlight of the five-year project was re-creating the ecclesiastic purple in the beautiful Holbein Chamber.
Filming
To produce the film, I spent three days with Pedro towards the end of the restoration project. I started filming as Pedro was creating the final purple colour samples in his Hoxton studio. The colour samples were required to show to restoration architects Inskip-Jenkins and helped The Strawberry Hill Trust to approve the chamber’s final pigment colour. To help describe the whole creative process, I also filmed an interview with Pedro in which he explained what was involved in re-creating historic paint finishes. The final day’s filming was at Strawberry Hill House as Pedro mixed the final pigments and started painting the freshly papered walls. Whilst filming at Strawberry Hill house, I also took the opportunity to take some still photographs to help paint over the audio edits in the film.
Video editing
The main challenge during the editing was to reduce a long question and answer session with Pedro and to condense his interview into a short, concise story. I started the film edit process by editing together the main essential statements that were most relevant to the project. Over a series of many days, I listened repeatedly to Pedro’s interview, re-ordered it, removed some non-essential words and any obvious audio gaps. Pedro is Portuguese and speaks English with a strong accent so I also needed to spend some extra time to ensure that the film’s final message was as clear as possible. During the editing process, I introduced a series of audio gaps in the interview sync in order to fill them with the sounds from the creative process actions. This helps the gentle pace of the story and allows the viewer to easily digest the content. The final film contains an extensive array of audio edits to ensure a smoother delivery and a shorter film duration.
After the story had been edited together with the interview audio I set about illustrating the story using the filmed video and still images. Photographer Elena Heatherwick spent a day filming at Strawberry Hill house after Pedro had completed the painting the Holbein Chamber and she kindly supplied many of the still images that I have used in the final film.
Artists promotional video
I’ve deliberately left the film sound-bed music free. In this particular instance, I believe that the gentle visuals and peaceful audio track combine to make this film enjoyable to watch and listen to. Hopefully, Horace Walpole would approve. If you would like to hire me as a freelance filmmaker for your artist’s promotional video please get in touch.
