Arsenal
Case Study

'Fitness Through Football' video for Arsenal FC's Community Outreach Team

The challenge:

Arsenal FC’s Community Outreach Team approached us to produce a short fund raising film highlighting their ground breaking mental health “Fitness Through Football” scheme that the club provides in it’s local North London community.

The challenge was to spend a month playing football and interacting with the patients in order to gain their trust to enable us film them participating and telling us their sometimes heartbreaking stories. stories.

The film, to be no longer than 5 minutes, had to produced within a month to meet the deadline of “National Mental Health Week” and to be showcased at half-time on all the screens at Emirates Stadium during the Arsenal v Leicester City match.

The approach:

The approach had to be handled with care and consideration for patients involved.

The research involved Producer / Director, Jon Stephenson training and working closely with the coaching staff and patients for a month prior to the final 2-day shoot.

We had to produce a film that would cover the football training programme, client interviews, graphics of government statistics and a final celebrity appearance by Arsenal and England midfielder Jack Wilshire.

The solution:

We produced a film which managed to cram in all the information and statistics required into a 3.5 minute video without making it complicated for the viewer.

By getting to know the patients at length beforehand it was easier to film their positive feedback naturally, so adding to the poignancy and honesty of the message Arsenal needed to convey.

One showing of the film at the Arsenal v Leicester Wednesday night game in the middle of “Mental Health Week” raised 35,000 from the stadium bucket collection from fans on the night.

The result:

“The film was instrumental in creating major awareness towards the issues surrounding mental health. It perfectly illustrated the huge benefits exercise and comradeship have in combatting it’s often devastating effects. Thanks to the film’s legacy it pioneered the global public perception of mental health”.

Jason Kelvin – Arsenal Mental Health Officer

The film remained on the Arsenal website for a further 8 months and was shown extensively UK wide at various mental health seminars for the rest of the year.

This helped position Arsenal as one of the forerunners in the football league for the good work teams do within their own communities. Within that time many more clubs followed suit and donations to the mental health project were boosted by over £150,000.

.

More case studies