ACM
A documentary about a music school that outgrew its own plan, made because a lender cannot credibly tell that story, and the borrower can.
Objective
ThinCats commissioned a short documentary showing how funding had supported the growth of the Academy of Contemporary Music.
The film needed to work as a credible customer story rather than a conventional lender promotion. In alternative finance the lender is the least believable narrator available: every claim it makes about outcomes is a claim about its own product. That meant putting ACM, not the funder, at the centre of the narrative, and keeping it there.
Creative response
The documentary was built around three complementary perspectives: leadership, teaching and student experience. Interviews with ACM's CEO, its mentors and its students let the story be told entirely in the institution's own words, with no voiceover and no lender spokesperson anywhere in the film.
The narrative was planned before filming. Four shoot days across the academy, the Boileroom and Metropolis Studios were briefed against a storyboard, so the crew went out to collect a story rather than to build a bank of footage and find one later, the difference between an edit that has a shape and an edit that has to be rescued.
Music created by ACM students formed the soundtrack. On a film about a music college that is not a licensing decision, it is the argument: the institution's own output carrying the institution's own story.
The final cut ran to three minutes, long enough to carry a real narrative, short enough to survive a launch event and a social feed, supported by shorter edits for social channels.
Results
- Premiered on 3 April 2019 at Metropolis Studios, Chiswick, to fifty London finance professionals, Metropolis being the studio ACM's own students work in, so the venue carried part of the argument
- The film tracks ACM from a single site in 2013 to three sites and over 2,500 students by 2019, the growth the lending paid for, and the reason there was a documentary to make
- Released across owned channels and syndicated into shorter cuts for social
3 APR 2019, premiere, Metropolis Studios, Chiswick
1 → 3 SITES: ACM's growth over the period the film covers, to 2,500+ students
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The work
