'Scale and Ambition'
Rocking Horse Pictures are cultivating a panoramic body of work, drawn from a comprehensive and ever-growing toolbox of film production skill. It is no surprise, then, that they ranked so strongly in 2023’s UK Top50 report. Its depth of creative bench is also no doubt part of leading employee benefits provider UNUM’s thinking when commissioning RHP to develop a unique brand film. And it was certainly a tricky and broad remit to cover.
On the one hand, the project required an illustration of UNUM’s insight into workspaces and their cultures. As innovators who platform mentalities of empowerment and social responsibility. On the other, the film also needed to move beyond the typical external audience to capture those who work as part of the UNUM family itself. But establishing a sense of pride and responsibility in a business’s workforce speaks to the strengths of a good brand film. Rocking Horse do just that here, with The UNUM Story scooping the finalist award at the New York Festivals under the Corporate Image: Branded Content category.
For a piece to serve two masters, while simultaneously complimenting each other, it must be malleable. The answer comes in the form of a film that strikingly resembles abstract theatre. Daily scenarios are presented through in-the-round trappings. Fluid camera motion and set pieces change in quick time, highlighting the added creative scope that the illusion of stage offers. With the theatre format also comes intimacy, where singular journeys can be experienced as a collective. This intelligently covers both the individual and the group, and UNUM’s desire for this piece to capture both external and internal audiences. Those who work within UNUM and those who come to it for guidance.
The result is a brand film clearly built on a fertile producer/business collaboration that shirks the default approaches to insurance sector brand film that we often see.
