SEEK SARA Awards Opening Film 2024

About the project

The SEEK SARA awards are held annually to honour the very best in the field of talent acquisition - to recognise those who help others find careers and put food on the table. On such an important night, it’s essential to get the vibes right from the very start. We were tasked with making a hype film, to build the energy at the event at its very opening and get everyone pumped to be there.

This involved capturing talent both in Melbourne at the SEEK head office, as well as abroad, this time heading across the Tasman to New Zealand, arriving in Auckland and filming there. In order to maximise efficiency, as well as the budget, I arrived the evening before, settled in and filmed all the next day, before flying out that evening.

While filming in small offices with limited gear, it can be a challenge to get enough unique interview angles and to make each space seem unique. That’s where using natural light comes in, a filmmaker's super power. Fancy lights can look impressive, but they can also do lots of negative things - they’re heavy and hard to take around, it can be expensive to hire a lighting tech, they can also intimidate talent who aren’t professional on-camera people - they’re folk who work in the business. You want to find yourself a filmmaker who can use natural light to their advantage and know how to work with minimal set up. We frequently are told how easy we made the entire process look and how incredible the images turn out, when there’s only 2, or in this case 1, of us on set. That’s what it means to punch above your weight in this space - keeping crews and budgets to a minimum but production quality and outcomes to a maximum.

Like many projects, this entire film came together in the edit. Since it’s an internal only film, not shown externally, we used a contemporary sound track to help lift the mood (library tracks are fine and certainly in most cases necessary - but if we can liven it up a little, why wouldn’t we!) and created a fast paced edit which accomplished the goal.