The Care Home

[01] The Business

Thirty-one residents. Staff who have worked there eleven years. Funded by a mix of local authority placements and donations, and permanently short of both.

[02] The Feed

Fundraising posts. Group photographs with faces blurred. The word journey, repeatedly.

[03] The Problem

This is the hardest brief here and it is here on purpose. The sector defaults to either sentiment or statistics, and both are ignorable. The people inside that building are extraordinary, and nobody films them because everybody is frightened of getting it wrong.

[05] The Work

Fewer films, more weight. Thirty to sixty seconds. Consent before anything else.

• One resident, one object they kept. They explain why. That is the whole film.
• A carer answers the same question at the end of every shift: what happened today that you will remember?
• “Three things to say to someone with dementia, and three not to.” Useful to thousands of families who are awake at one in the morning, searching.
• No music underneath anybody who is speaking. Ever.

[06] Why It Works

The audience for a care home is not the donor. It is the exhausted daughter deciding something enormous on her phone at night. Useful outperforms moving, every time. And dignity here is a production decision, not a sentiment: eye level, full frame, real names with consent, nothing hidden and nothing exploited.

[07] What We Measure

Saves and direct enquiries, never views. A film seen four hundred times that produces two family conversations has beaten one seen ninety thousand times.