How to Produce a Documentary for a Business Client: Behind the Scenes of NBForum
NBForum is one of the biggest and most well-known business events of the Nordic countries. We filmed the ten-year anniversary documentary, taking a look at the people behind the event. Learn how we made the documentary and find out about the challenges on the road in this blog.
The production process that in total lasted for ten months taught our team one valuable lesson — you cannot always be in control of the story and predict the future. Sometimes, as a documentary film director, one needs to let go and see how the story evolves by itself.
Discussing the Idea
The idea to make a documentary with NBForum was born one year before the anniversary event took place in Helsinki, the capital of Finland. After some discussion between our co-founder Georgius, our executive producer Serj and Tuomas from NBForum, both agreed that no cinematic intros were necessary, and this would be a documentary film instead.
After further talks with Tuomas who was the head of digital and marketing at NBForum at the time, we decided to capture the event as a documentary film, rather than a flashy aftermovie. This would be a step forward for Vita Pictura to actually build a story rather than just to make an aftermovie since this would have long-lasting memory for NBForum.
One of the main inspirations that we shared before starting filming, was the Formula 1: Drive to Survive series on Netflix; for example, the idea of the countdown to the event we see in the film was taken from there. The series also showed our editor Georgius how such themes as stress, time management and working under pressure can be portrayed in a documentary.
Preparation for the Production
We started with outlining and developing an idea around the messages of the main characters we could have in the film. A lot of decisions had to be made on the go. Soon it was evident that the main characters would be:
- Co-founder and Executive Producer (2010–2019) Hans-Peter.
- Head of Customer Care Salla.
- Winner of speaker’s contest and speaker at NBForum 2019 Anssi.
The first interview was recorded one month before the event in August, with Salla, head of the Customer Experience of the event. In the documentary, she talks about the main theme of the event — leadership, which is essential in her role. She has to manage hundreds of people and make sure thousands of top-level guests feel themselves at home during the two days of the NBForum.
In September 2019, three weeks before the event, our crew went to Jyväskylä, the home town of the co-founder of the event Hans-Peter, where we took the interview you may see at the beginning of our documentary film. Here we introduce Hans-Peter, or Hape, as people close to him call him.
Then, two weeks before the event, we met Anssi and filmed him so he could express his thoughts about the preparation for his future speech in front of thousands of entrepreneurs and world leaders. Anssi also won the speaker’s contest at NBForum and got the chance to speak alongside famous writers, entrepreneurs, actors and world leaders.
The three interviews became the foundation of the film and almost a kind of a script of the film — we deconstructed the interviews and sorted the way how they should be placed in the film. These three characters became the core story since we didn’t have the initial fully developed script at that point. We wanted to hear how the decisions were being made behind the scenes and these interviews were dictating us how the story would unravel. Once we have marked the three main characters and each of their unique feel, we moved on to write down the three themes of the film.
Hans-Peter, the organizer of the event, became the character to represent the first theme — confidence. This is one of the key aspects one needs to have in order to manage such a large-scale event. This theme was supplemented by the visuals of timers and count-downs; Hape’s enemy is time and we want to see how he deals with it.
Salla is known by her co-workers as the Queen of Calm, because of the way she deals with difficult situations under pressure. Her tasks in the forum include training of the interns and team leaders, and making sure everyone feels comfortable. Dealing with stress became her theme as well.
Anssi, a younger speaker and winner of the speaker’s contest, became the central character for the theme of performing under pressure. Our DOP team captured Anssi’s expectations about being on stage and how he deals with anxiety. Fear of public speaking became another central theme of this character.
Working with Anssi proved to be very smooth as he was open with the filming crew and spoke his mind:
Anssi: “Working with Vita Pictura was a fun and smooth process. I didn’t actually feel too bothered about being filmed during the game day because I was so comfortable and prepared for my presentation. A quote that I strive to live by is “we don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training”. In other words, because I had practiced so much for the presentation pretty much anything could’ve happened on the day and it wouldn’t have bothered me.”
Spontaneity or a Strict Plan?
However, when the filming began on the massive grounds of Messukeskus, we noticed Nazzira who was in charge of one of the most hectic places during the event, the warehouse. We captured the touching story unfolding between her and the Peruvian ballet girls, who had been invited to perform on the stage. The lively interactions they had made us think if we should include the fourth character in the documentary, and as you may see, this is exactly what we did. This was a purely spontaneous decision made during the editing of the film after all of the events have long been completed. In the end, she organically fitted into the film during the post-production process.
In addition, the story with Anssi, the winner of the Speaker Contest at NBForum, also evolved organically — we filmed him two weeks before the event, and then asked if we could continue filming him at his apartment and if his girlfriend would also be there in the morning of the event. It turned out that they both didn’t mind being fined at home, so this added a more realistic feeling to the whole picture.
Apart from the interviews, which were a crucial part in the creation of the story, we needed to be prepared to film the environment which we could not control. This, in turn, led to the documentary being more observational, rather than staged, except of course for the interviews with the main characters.
The Story of Post-production
After three days of shooting with several cameras, our core post-production team of Kaupo and Georgius had to go through 60 hours of footage, which took 3 months in total to sort, and another 3 months to build a comprehensive story.
The editing took time and was challenging at times as expected. We needed to go through hours of dialogues and understand which parts we would like to include. In fact, no one from the team was a Finnish speaker, so we asked help from Karolina Lahti, Vita Pictura’s new team member at the time, to translate the Finnish parts of the footage. And you may imagine there was a lot of it, as it was all filmed in Finland. Of course, Tuomas as well helped us understand the Finnish dialogues we had filmed. In addition, we needed to translate Salla’s Swedish parts of the dialogues. As you may know, Swedish is the second official language in Finland and is widely spoken as well.
We wanted to include more dialogues in Finnish but understood that the film would have to be around two hours long. Nonetheless, the first draft of the film was around two hours in length, instead of the current 45-minute film. We have been discussing a 20–30-minute film in the beginning, but the amount of material we had made us create a slightly longer piece of work :)
What we really enjoyed in the post-production process, is the clear communication style with the organizers of the event — they made it clear that 2 hours would be too much, and no massive changes were requested from them, so in the end, the process was flawless. We trusted them, and they trusted us to do our job. This meant we could include parts in the film that otherwise might have been left out.
Change in Perception
The worldwide crisis affected the perception of the film — it made it nostalgic. You can see people’s lively interactions, hugging, close discussions — none of this is possible in our new reality. In effect, most of the videos including some groups of people have become nostalgic in the year 2020. Therefore, instead of being just a story about people behind the largest Nordic business event, it also became a story about the times we lost for some time.
Well-known events around the world at the beginning of 2020 affected the organizers of the event, just like anyone in the business of conferencing. Follow the updates on the next NBForum’s events on their website.
Written by Roman Pototski
