Immigrant Council of Ireland: 10 videos, 10 languages, 1 day

The Immigrant Council of Ireland is an NGO based in Dublin city, working to provide assistance to people from a migrant background. The ICI wanted to communicate the message that everyone living in Ireland, regardless of nationality, has the right to vote and run in local elections. We were approached to produce a series of videos, in multiple languages, that would clearly communicate this message to the various diasporas that live in Ireland, and encourage people to register and get involved in local government. 

Our Producer, Róisín, talks us through the process of undertaking this task.

Creating a script in 10 languages

We worked with the team at the ICI to develop a concept that would involve people from multiple countries, speaking their own languages. The ICI chose the 10 languages to feature in the videos and found 10 volunteers to take part. All of the participants in the video are from outside Ireland but have made their home here. None of them are professional presenters.

We wrote the script in English first and identified the information to be delivered and the tone of voice. The script involved a mix of PTC (pieces-to-camera) and VO (voice over). PTCs are always more difficult for non-professional presenters to do as it requires memorising the lines and speaking directly to camera, whereas for a VO you can read from the script and ignore the camera. We decided to reorganise the shooting script so that we could film the PTCs first, as usually people are more relaxed on a shoot when they can get the hard or more intimidating bits out of the way first.

We broke the script into 6 sections in order of how we would shoot them (rather than in order of how they would appear in the actual finished video): PTC 1, PTC 2, PTC 3, VO 1, VO 2, VO 3. We then sent the re-ordered script to be translated into Polish, Spanish, Mandarin, Romanian, Russian, Arabic, Lithuanian, French and Portuguese.

Setting up the shoot

On a fresh autumnal day, we set up in Dublin’s D Light studios. Conor, the Creative Director on the project, had given us a clear brief and moodboard of what the final shots should look like. So while Daniel, the Videographer got the lights and cameras set up, I figured out how to work the very impressive coffee machine (thanks D Light Studios!).

We knew that we needed a loose mid-shot (MS) and also a full-length (FL) shot, from the same angle, of each take so that Graham, the Editor, would have something to work with in the edit. To deliver these two shots simultaneously Daniel stacked the cameras, this then presented a problem of eye-lines, as in the PTCs, the eye-line in one of the cameras would be slightly off (they couldn’t look directly into two lenses at the same time!). We got around this problem by asking the participants to deliver the PTCs to the MS camera as the FL shot was wide enough that the slight inaccuracy on the eye-line was negligible and so would not be obvious to viewers. 

As the participants came in I got time to chat to each of them; I wanted to make sure they knew what we expected them to do, that they were happy with the script translations, and to give them time to relax before standing in front of the cameras. It was really interesting to talk to each person who participated in the shoot. Some people had been in Ireland for years and have families here, others were new to the country but were eager to make Ireland their home. While it was very interesting to chat to the participants about their cultures, their backgrounds and their experiences of Ireland, it was also fascinating from a linguistic perspective to learn about each language and the different approaches to communicating the key messages of the campaign.