Producing a series of six five-minute documentaries about Elm Hill Street in Norwich. How we brought more customers to the shops in Elm Hill and increased the emotional connection between shopkeepers and the customers.
Project Overview
The chair of Elm Hill Friends Company, Richard Eagleton, commissioned me to make a series of promotional poetic documentaries about the Elm Hill shops. He wanted the films to be slow, but also informational about the street and the shopkeepers.
He explained that about a hundred years ago, Elm Hill was in danger, and it was saved by a local campaign. Now the shops are under threat again because of the increase in online shopping and are being forgotten. Our goal is to remind people of Elm Hill and bring more customers back to the street.
The Approach
I successfully briefed the shopkeepers on the project, and I was able to get six of them to agree to appear on camera. I set a three-month timeframe for filming and spread the six shops across those three months. Then I researched the history of Elm Hill, asked the shopkeepers what it means to them to be in Elm Hill, and observed the street visually — how it feels to be there, what colour scheme it represents, and what ideas we could develop for designing the graphics for the film.
Then I briefed the project to other students at Norwich University of the Arts, and I formed a team consisting of a graphic designer, an editor, and a behind-the-scenes videographer. While we were filming, our graphic designer was working on the visuals. I decided to base the graphics for the films on the shop signs on Elm Hill Street.
We only filmed with a Canon 90D, a simple tripod, and a lavalier microphone, so the setup was quite minimal. But I showed strong interview skills on set, and one of the shopkeepers told me, “Vafa, you showed great emotional intelligence during your interview. We all felt so comfortable being vulnerable in front of your camera. Being interviewed by you and answering your questions revealed new parts of ourselves to each other that we didn’t know before.”
Because of that, I believe the emotional truth in the films makes up for some of the technical gaps.
The Results
Screening
We successfully screened the films in a modern bookshop café in Norwich. We invited the shopkeepers and put up posters around the city to bring in a local audience. The feedback was amazing, and we realised that many local people didn’t know about the shopkeepers on Elm Hill.
We had two interviews with BBC Radio Norfolk about the Elm Hill series — one during the production and one after the release to reflect on whether we had achieved our goal. I believe we did, because many people started visiting the shops and mentioned that they had seen the documentaries and that was the reason for their visit. Also, after our BBC interview, a lot of people commented on our YouTube channel saying that they had discovered the project through BBC Radio Norfolk.
We were also featured in the official UEA student newspaper, Concrete. We did an interview with one of their journalism students, and the project was also covered by the Eastern Daily Press.
