City Branding & Culture
It’s in Nottingham
It’s in Nottingham
Project Outline
Full Film: https://youtu.be/W341QGJuiBI
It's in Nottingham is the organisation behind Nottingham city centre.
As the city's Business Improvement District, they represent over 750 businesses, coordinate an annual programme of events, manage a city-wide safety operation, and maintain constant working relationships with every significant stakeholder in the city.
The Challenge
Every five years, they go to ballot. Every business in the BID area votes on whether to continue paying the levy that funds all of it.
In 2025, that ballot was coming. And I was brought in not just to make a film, but to build the video production strategy that would help secure a win for the next ballot.
The Solution
The centrepiece was a 30-minute documentary built across a full year of filming, from February 2024 to February 2025. The brief was to capture what It's in Nottingham actually does, not the polished surface of it, but the real operation underneath. The planning meetings. The behind-the-scenes preparation for major events months before they happen. The business owners, frontline staff, senior leadership, and city partners who make Nottingham's city centre function. All of it, assembled into something that could sit in a cinema and hold an audience.
Over three terabytes of footage. Dozens of interview subjects, from the CEO down to sales assistants in city centre shops and cafes. Locations across the entire city, each requiring advance coordination, permissions, and in many cases, dedicated risk assessments for aerial filming. The voiceover script that anchors the whole film evolved over the course of the year, shaped by an ongoing process of creative development alongside the IiN team.
The edit had a dual responsibility. It needed to be accurate enough that the people who know the organisation intimately would watch it and say yes, that is what we do. And it needed to be accessible enough that someone with no prior knowledge of a BID would watch it and genuinely care. Getting both right, inside a single 30-minute cut, is the central challenge of the whole project.
Every element of the production, concept, cinematography, sound, drone work, interviews, editing, colour, motion graphics, voiceover development, was handled by one person.
The result
On 11 March 2025, the film screened at Broadway Cinema Nottingham. Over 300 people attended the first screening, which also served as a city networking event. A further 50 to 80 came for the second. Many of them were levy-paying businesses who had supported the BID for years but had never seen the full picture of what their contribution funded.
Alongside the documentary, I produced over 10 short-form ballot campaign films. Each one drew from the same year of footage and addressed a specific pillar of the BID's work, events, safety, business support, economic impact. Those films became the backbone of all ballot communications in the weeks that followed the premiere. Every piece of outreach the organisation sent during the ballot period was built on the content we had made together.
The result: 96% in favour by rateable value. 95% by voting intention. A further five-year term secured. Over 750 businesses voted to continue. CEO Alex Flint called it "an outstanding result for us all."
Lessons Learned:
Large agencies build teams of eight to deliver projects like this. A producer, a director, a camera operator, a sound recordist, an editor, a colourist, a motion graphics artist, a project manager. I delivered it as one person, across twelve months, inside a live organisation, coordinating with more than a dozen partner bodies across the city.
What makes that possible is not just technical range. It is the ability to understand an organisation deeply enough to build your own creative framework, earn the trust required to execute it with real autonomy, and sustain the vision across a year of shifting schedules, changing priorities, and hundreds of hours of footage.
If your organisation has a story that a 90-second promo cannot hold, get in touch.
