For this episode in the Cygnet Health Care Music 2 Empower series, we were given the task of filming the story of a service user named Rob, who was a resident of 5 years at Cygnet Stevenage Hospital. Rob’s story was chosen to highlight the opening of a new music studio with the help of key staff within the hospital. We aimed to gain insight into Rob’s experience when initiating and carrying out this project, highlighting how it aided his own recovery, as well as how it impacted his fellow service users.
In the pre-production phase of this project, we planned to execute a video with the consistent story arc of how setting up a studio was for Rob and how it will benefit other service users. We wanted to learn more about how the idea of a music studio came about and who were the key influencers in managing to launch this successful project. This involved detailed pre-production planning, to ensure that we could create a video with a high standard of lighting, audio & video output, while filming in both an interview, as well as an event-based setting.
The video production phase consisted of travelling and filming across the United Kingdom to capture first hand the amazing performances and conversations with the service users. We were facilitated by each site's management to have a dedicated place of filming where our video production crew were allowed to set up our lights, audio and camera equipment to capture what we required. Each service user was interviewed and given time to perform in front of the camera. Questions were asked by our team to better understand how music therapy was helping them on their road to recovery. Further interviews with speech and language therapists, doctors and carers added a professional perspective on how music therapy was assisting service users. Post video production kicked off by creating a special video introduction to all the Music 2 Empower videos. This was achieved by collating video clips from various video shoots we had done to introduce each service users performance. Each video filmed is being used by Cygnet Healthcare to promote this special initiative internally amongst their sites and at board level. Some of the videos are also planned to be highlighted on their official YouTube channel.
