The St. Oscar Romero Promotional Video 2020

Having just spent the last three weeks creating a promotional film for my school I thought it was worth taking a moment to reflect on the design process. 

Some background

I joined St. Oscar Romero Catholic School in January 2018, a term after Pete Byrne had arrived as the new headteacher (it was previously known as Chatsmore). I was the first teacher he recruited.

In the nearly three years I have been working at the school it has been dizzying¹ seeing just how much has changed. Ofsted landed very favourably for us in the first year; then we achieved an ‘all-category-outstanding’ section 48 inspection by the Diocesan inspection team the year after. Results have since risen dramatically, lifting the school into the top 20% nationally. 

What used to be viewed as a ’nice but harmless’ small school in Goring is now an organisation with real teeth on the national stage. The Lost Box passion project² coordinated by my physics-teaching pal Pete Clarke is a symbol of the culture change within the school. The two sides of the timetable have been renamed Oxford/Cambridge with the first heads of school under Pete Byrne currently applying for Oxbridge after successfully winning scholarships to Brighton College and Christ’s Hospital to study their A levels. 

In 2018 I created this promo video which provides an insight into where the school was at:

A sweet collaborative spot

Pete Byrne approached me just as lock-down hit earlier in the year with the idea of recreating this first video. In the end we ended up with something shorter and sweeter:

I am particularly pleased with this end product because it hit a collaborative sweet-spot. Some notes:

• Instead of playing it safe and repopulating the original video with updated uniform shots we were adventurous and took a more organic approach with the material. I worked hard at trying to explore what was in front of me - playing with how it might be seen. In the end this material took it’s own shape in the edit that a cast-iron approach would never have allowed for.

• I combined four very different camera systems - an Insta360 One X, an iPhone Pro Max, a Canon 4k with 20x optical zoom and a DJI drone (ta Second Unit Director Dougie Hauser). Having a sense of where the respective strengths lay was important - I spent a day wandering round using the 360 camera testing it out and was delighted to bring it into the tool box. 

• Being an insider has massive advantages. One of the problems with corporate video production is that the end result is often hollow, even dead inside as the prompted marionettes parade their obedient moves. That famous saying: ‘the best camera is the one with you’ could easily be exchanged for: ‘the best cameraperson is the one who is known by the subjects’. If the people in front of the camera aren’t at ease it all becomes a bit artificial and cosmetic. This video has soul - those aren’t fake smiles. Real people are really engaging. 

• The process was a journey of discovery for us all. It’s interesting to hear Pete Byrne speak about how this production clarified his own thinking about the school - not something to take lightly! Drafting, forming and refining this brand statement was exciting because we ended up discovering a diamond at the end. 

Rebranding: a new skin or identifying the emerging, underlying character?

The last point raises an important question when it comes to rebranding any organisation: much of the time it becomes an inevitably cynical (and expensive) exercise in logo/font/graphic design. The thinking goes like this: if we look better we will become better - thus inspiring inner change and providing value for the target audience. You can probably tell that I don’t like this approach - I think it lacks integrity. I believe that the best thing you can do with a rebrand is to identify and polish the best of what is already there. 

As I said above - in this instance we discovered a diamond - a school identity that had substantially moved on (Infinite Possibilities - imagine what is possible) to something more concrete (Every Door Open - lets get on with walking through and grasping those opportunities). 

Last words: I loved making this video because I got to hang out with really fun people and enjoy collaborating on some awesome images. Having said that, the biggest pleasure was what we discovered about the underlying character of the school. 

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¹It is no understatement to say that being a secondary school teacher is extremely demanding - every day feels like you are working in a 24/7 Formula 1 pitstop crew. The experience of solitude and quiet reflection are largely banished to holidays and occasional weekends so be warned if you are thinking of following this career: it is simultaneously amazing and crushing. 

² Winners of the highly respected Big Bang competition this summer and now shortlisted for the TES awards this November. 

Cardinal Newman Campus Map

A Map isn’t simply about sharing geographical details: it frames your relationship to that information

In a lovely chapter entitled ‘Tools of the Mind’, Nicholas Carr discusses the connection between cartography and thought processes:

The map is a medium that not only stores and transmits information but also embodies a particular mode of seeing and thinking. (p41, The Shallows)

The idea of a seeing ‘mode’ was central to my thinking as I designed this map for newcomers arriving at Cardinal Newman Catholic High School.

Some process notes: now in timelapse form!

Here is a one minute video of the process.

The thinking behind the design

It became clear early on that CNCS has a complicated layout. In figuring out how to find a solution I found myself returning to Scott Berkun’s Four Key Design Questions:

1. What are you trying to improve?

2. Who are you trying to improve it for?

3. How do you ensure you are successful?

4. Who might be hurt by your work (both now and in the future)?

So what were we trying to improve - and for whom?

Newcomers to the school who need a quick way of grasping the ‘zones’ and ‘arteries’ of CNCS.

Success criteria

In developing the map it was great to speak with people who had recently ‘learnt’ to navigate the campus. The most useful conversation I had was with a current year 8 student. First term confusion was still fresh in her mind and proved a valuable experience to dig into. I learnt that after a couple of weeks most students are competent at finding their way following others and muddling through, but there was still a need to speed this process up (plus: not all visitors have two weeks for exploration).

I started with the idea of creating a set of room-by-room exploded floor diagrams: similar to the Sussex University map (below). But after a short time of breaking everything down, the complexity became a bit of a concern. It seemed to me that there were three problems to solve when finding your way around a new school:

• What the main buildings are

• How they link to each other

• How you find your way inside each one

You can see how this might have gone - fortunately this approach was rejected.

Example of a map I produced for Sussex uni.

After some reflection and deliberation with Jo Henderson (the marketing and communications manager) we decided that solving the first two problems was the best use of our time. In my mind it was rather like a London Tube map consisting of stations/zones and lines/arteries connecting them. To my relief this was now the settled plan.

In posing the the question “How will you know if you are truly successful?” - one can’t really know until mid-September but I am confident that we have arrived at something that will improve the experience of people visiting the school. I love that Jo Henderson has termed this as ‘phase 1’ of an ongoing project. Being able to return to this in a few months to consider incremental improvements sits well with me. I look forward to seeing how things improve.

future harms?

Berkun’s fourth question is concerned with ethical forecasting - and is probably quite annoying to the casual reader. What are the consequences of placing this design in the public arena? Will it introduce damaging patterns of thought or action? Will it cause cultural confusion - and if so, how might this be mitigated in advance? Yes, this is probably overthinking things, but these are issues that deserve consideration - a map isn’t just a pretty picture - as per Carr’s writing above, it is a ‘mode’ of seeing which will frame how people relate to a physical space. Maps maketh culture.

If I was going to respond to this baffling question, I might point to the self-conscious limits of the design brief. While it doesn’t aim to teach people how to get to some of the tucked-away rooms, it bears some responsibility for the inevitable frustration a Year 7 might feel on September 5th as they try to find one of those obscure Attic rooms in the Cashman building. Realising this from the start means that other good combined solutions might be implemented - such as the existing mentoring relationships that are encouraged between older and younger students. To me this is a significant strength found within any healthy school community - when students take active responsibility for each other.

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Thankyou to Principal Claire Jarman (for warmly inviting me to make something for CNCS) and Jo Henderson for being so flexible and kind as we worked through the different stages.