Break Your Own Record
Raw Crossfit gym wanted a gym video to showcase their newly opened branch in Model Town, Delhi. They reached out to us and asked if we could shoot on a Sunday for a few hours and hand them over a gym property/ equipment display video the next day. They might have approached a few content creators and social media influencers, so they told us that their budget is about 20k for this video.
Now how do you take that as a filmmaker running a creative video agency? 20K is possibly what we might pay to the rental company and support team for a day's rent, but here's a client looking for a video with a budget of 20k (in rupees is less than the US $300). That means creative talent, technical talent, support team, camera gear, lights, sound, travel & transportation and post-production, everything included.
We could have said NO and continued hunting for another project, while someone could have made a regular fitness video for even 15k or less; such is the market. So we asked ourselves how we can change the Gym Owner's mindset and at least let him know what we do at French Fries Films and help him grow his fitness business with meaningful full videos.
We started with his aspirations for this gym and his fitness business and then to who is their target group? What is their annual income? Where do they live? Which smartphone do they own? Which social media platform do they use the most? And a lot of questions to draw their customer demographics.
The owner seemed confused and asked us, why are you asking such questions? You should be asking about the gym and the facilities and tell me how you will enhance what we have.
That's where everything changed for both of us. We were motivated to guide him through the science of the storytelling process we apply at FFF, and he was now keen on learning what kind of video could help his fitness business. And his open-mindedness helped us both break our own records, literally.
We were looking to step into commercial narrative work. We needed someone to have faith in us and sponsor our 1st brand commercial; we were ready to do it for less money/ cost to cost and do this 1st job to build a portfolio and experience the jump for ourselves. The gym owner was keen on getting more value for the money. Having something that would really help his gym business grow and attract targeted people was a no-brainer deal but still uncomfortable money-wise for him; we are now multiple times ahead of 20k, especially during the pandemic where the gyms were closed for over 6 months. And he was unsure of the coming months and his existing customers.
Abhimanyu Aneja wrote a narrative hitting the right chords, the gym owner couldn’t say no to it and truly understood the value we are going to bring and gave us a green signal. We started to look for on-screen talent and found Vanee Kaur suitable to play the lead showing how consistent action and passion for achieving goals can help you break your own barriers irrespective of your situation. With her coming on board we modified our storyboard and added her real life situation where she has to look after her 7 years old son, the entire home and then take out time for herself to workout.
This added more value to the narrative and gave this whole effort a boost. We were motivated to make this and then the 2nd locked down happened with 1 day of shoot left. Our dream project was on hold for 2 months from Mid April to Mid June 2021, before we could request Vanee to give us a day with limited crew to finish the shoot and after everything, here it is ‘Break Your Own Record’.
Credits:
Written, Narrated, Directed and Edited by: Abhimanyu Aneja
Shot by: Bhaavan Goswami & Ravneet Oberoi
Produced by: Ravneet Oberoi
Post-production, Color grading support by Team French Fries.
Featuring: Vanee Kaur
Client: Raw Crossfit
