The brief
Seveer were asked to create a series of videos to promote Manchester Metropolitan University’s Postgraduate recruitment campaign – one longer narrative film with supporting social media cuts. All the content needed to complement an existing unique visual concept built around the line Stand Out.
We needed something that would capture the spirit of the inherited reference, whilst giving it more legs.
Our approach
We proposed a video series that didn’t talk at students — but with them. We knew from the brief that a lot of potential Postgraduate students are anxious about the best path forward, unsure how to give themselves an edge in a competitive job market. Our narrative leaned into that uncertainty, using an inner monologue VO that celebrated bold choices and depicted that exact moment when the inner shift happens – the instant when someone decides to go for it with postgraduate study.
With a grounded visual language of authentic moving portraits, the film created space to honour this theme and allow viewers to see themselves in the array of students all eager to achieve more and stand out.
We chose to show five students standing at a pivotal crossroads, each caught in the noise of expectations as they chose their path – with a relatable sentence capturing their current inertia emblazoned on their clothes as graphics.
Our master hero film carried the main narrative ready to support five individual alumni interview films telling real lived stories. Visually, they all needed to feel of a single piece, and part of the wider campaign – confident, contemporary, human, and stylised. Each video was to be a personal and emotional snapshot of identity, growth and choice.
Like the master film, our interviews were structured around that ‘moment’ when they decided to take the step into Postgraduate study and how it has since enabled them to stand out.
Technical Details
The production was scoped as a three-day shoot with a Seveer crew of 5 on site.
The schedule was tight and ambitious, but Manchester Met accommodated all our plans, supplying us with the five postgraduate alumni we needed for our main protagonists. They also provided us with a stream of student extras to help us recreate a busy campus atmosphere, despite filming during the summer shutdown – key for our closing image.
To bring our narrative to a close we proposed a heavily stylised final frame: one of the students stood sharply in focus outside a modern campus building, against a backdrop filled with a blur of time lapsed students passing by. We wanted to show her caught in the rush of the day but remaining calm and assured – quiet confidence, whilst also literally standing out from the crowd.
The interview films were located in the students’ own study environments, to reflect their personal specialism and passion, whilst showing a variety of campus locations for scale and interest. These were filmed using a two-camera set-up in a loose, handheld style – the best way to capture each individual’s unique energy and personality. Handheld camerawork helped create a natural and unscripted feel – allowing us to stay close to the action, whilst reinforcing a sense of realism and authenticity.
Each film featured a backdrop in Manchester Met’s signature blue, a consistent visual anchor that tied each of the films together within the campaign. Locations themselves were made to feel both cinematic and authentic, visually alive with striking composition yet totally human at the core.
Integrating messages as text was also a key ‘social first’ component of the brief. We suggested filming in a way that allowed for us to have key moments flash up as a breakaway statement, allowing use to create a split screen in the edit. Each interview was filmed utilising negative space that would accommodate for this, before ultimately settling on the approach of embedding phrases into the frame, reinforcing key statements as part of the action itself.
The films
Hero
Student Stories
