A decade of making films with the NSPCC
A little over ten years ago, I walked into the NSPCC’s headquarters near Liverpool Street, for an intro meeting - entirely too caffeinated for my own good. I found out later that I’d been visibly shaking as we chatted with the charity’s new Creative Director and Head of Marketing Ian MacArthur. In the meeting we talked about how the future of online content was video, lots and lots of video, especially for young people. And the NSPCC needed filmmakers with ideas for content that would work without the traditional ad-land budgets.
Aside from the litre or so of coffee I’d consumed, I can honestly say that at least some of the shakes were down to me being thrilled just to get that meeting. For context, 3angrymen at the time could more accurately be described as two incredibly naïve freelancers with access to a couple of Sony Z1s. We’d made a couple of fun promos for not a lot of money but nobody was taking us remotely seriously and so this really was a big opportunity for us.
Here’s Louis Haywood (Creative Producer at the NSPCC 2007-2017), to add a lovely dollop of context:
“When we first started making video content at NSPCC we were working with tiny budgets and needed hungry, talented collaborators with fresh ideas. That pretty much sums up 3am at the time. They just seemed to have loads of great ideas buzzing around in their head, they were learning their trade and the NSPCC were learning how to use strategic video content so we grew and learned together.”
A decade on, on a day when we’re releasing our latest campaign film for the charity, it strikes me how as a team we still get just as jazzed about working with the NSPCC as we did back then.
So to mark the occasion I thought I’d take a little self-indulgent walk down memory lane, to look at some of the films we’ve produced and how, in a world of fleeting collaborations, working with a client over such a significant chunk of time can affect a production company.
As Guy and I bundled giddily out of the lift of NSPCC HQ that day, we immediately and hurriedly started thinking about ideas that might answer the first brief - to make a film about exam stress. Before we’d even begun to make our way back to our tiny office in Ladbroke Grove we thought we had something - we wouldn’t make a film about exam stress, that sounded dull. Instead, we’d put our obsession with OKGO videos to good use and make something fun set in an exam room, something to put a smile on the faces of all those students marching into sports halls to blank pages and their impending doom.
We pitched the idea, along with a severely undercooked 2-page treatment, to Ian a week later. We were going to do a sort of dance video, students performing wave after Mexican wave in the midst of an oh-so-serious exam - tagline “exams don’t have to be stressful”. To his credit (and our eternal gratitude), Ian broke into a broad mischievous grin on hearing the idea and gave us the green light and a modest budget to make it happen.
And that was, as they say, that. A month or so down the line, the film was released on Youtube and for the first time we got to experience what it felt like to make something that went viral. Even better for us, it got press, getting mentions in the Guardian and Creative Review, which blew our tiny minds.
The one with the teenagers doing Mexican waves (Mexican Exam, 2011)
Since then we’ve gone on to create well over 50 films for the NSPCC (not including a billion or so cutdowns and re-edits) on topics including depression, self-harm, neglect, forced marriage, contacting Childline and letters to Santa - it ain’t for the faint-hearted but it’s always felt good to be talking about stuff that genuinely matters.
For whatever reason, the relationship clicked and the briefs have kept coming, here’s current Senior Creative Producer, Andy Abrahams on why he thinks it works:
“I love working with the Angry team because they do like to challenge us creatively – dissecting a brief to fully understand what we want to say and how best to achieve that. It can be quite a tough process and sometimes we even have to go back to the drawing board. But I always come out the other side with more confidence about the films. It’s a genuinely collaborative way of working.”
While we’re on the subject of collaboration, we should mention all of the many people we’ve met as part of making the films - the NSPCC employees up for appearing on film and victims of abuse who have bravely, generously shared their stories with us. Not to mention the brilliant crew members and Angry Alumni who’ve brought deep wells of both ambition and sensitivity to the process. We’ve even got to hob-knob with celebs here and there: from Natalie Dormer from Game of Thrones, to Wayne Rooney, to the apple of Guy’s eye: Marvin Humes from JLS.
Want to see a few of the films from the back catalogue? Oh go on then.
The one wiht the cool neon VFX which earned us our first million-view video on YouTube (U Can Talk To Us, 2011)
The paper-craft one we made 15 times in several different languages (Making Contact, 2011 - 2016)
The one we put together mid-pandemic (Frontline, 2020)
It hasn’t always been an easy ride of course, naturally there have been some very tough challenges along the way - from researching harrowing personal stories of abuse to trying to get 70 odd teenagers to sit still for two whole shoot days. And then there was the time they convinced me to run the London Marathon with a Go-Pro protruding from my chest. But you don’t get good at making films for national charities by coasting through easy-to-put-together productions. You’re far too busy trying to squeeze out every single penny from the budget, trying to enlist freelancers who’ll go a good bit above and beyond for the cause, finding ways to disguise the fact that the 3angrymen team and their families are appearing, yet again, as extras.
Here’s that Louis Haywood chap again:
“Working with 3am was a different experience from working with the big ad agencies who were less collaborative. 3am made films with us, rather than for us. The nature of the relationship meant they could get under the skin of the brief themselves as creatives rather than account managers relaying information to 'creative' teams who wanted to win awards for shocking people.”
That brings me to the flip-side of what we’ve been doing for the NSPCC - to the question of what working for the charity has done for us. The answer is that it has undoubtedly, irreversibly and fundamentally shaped us as a company. Put it this way, we certainly didn’t set out with some grand plan for becoming a production company specialising in making films for charities. But that’s where we got to, we love it here and so we ain’t going anywhere.
Working with the NSPCC helped define what our values are, it influenced how we approach all budgets and continues to push our creative process to new levels.
When we first trembled into that meeting, one of the first things we were told was that we weren’t there to make the films with the crying kids in dirty cots, that style of NSPCC film had run its course and we were gifted the challenge of telling the story from another angle. That’s something we’ve tried to employ in every piece of work we’ve taken on since. It would be so easy, in a long-term client relationship, to keep making the same style of film, but the team over there has always pushed us to evolve our ideas, there’s always been an appetite for trying new approaches.
And it’s brought us to the attention of the other clients who we now work with. Without that initial break from the NSPCC, who knows if we’d have ended up working with the likes of Scouts, Crisis, Mencap, Leonard Cheshire and the Samaritans.
Perhaps the biggest, most fundamental effect it’s had on us is shaping the personality and temperament of the 3angrymen team. Whenever we post a job vacancy, we know we’re going to attract brilliant individuals who’ve seen our charity work and want to be a part of that, who are driven toward helping us make more films that matter, thus they give it their absolute all whenever those opportunities arise.
It’s a virtuous cycle we’re very grateful to be in.
I’ll end with a few thank yous: to some of the individuals at the NSPCC who have, along the way, kept trusting us to make the work - to Ian, Rosie, Louis, Kevin, James, Joy, Jules, Angie, Sue, Lorrin, Andy and Sophie - we owe you all a lot.
Here’s to the next decade or so.
Thom