An Anthony Nolan brand film built around real people

Anthony Nolan commissioned Magneto Films to create a brand film marking what would have been the 50th birthday of Anthony Nolan, whose illness led his mother Shirley Nolan to establish the charity.

The brief had to connect that history with what Anthony Nolan had become: supporting people with blood cancer, matching patients with stem-cell donors, providing specialist care and carrying out research into new treatments.

We built the film around people who could tell those different parts of the story themselves. Filmed in Birmingham, the contributors included two cancer survivors, a stem-cell donor, Anthony Nolan’s chief nurse and its lead research scientist.

Bringing personal experience, healthcare and science together

We used an approach we call ‘many voices, one story’. Before filming, we interviewed contributors and developed a structure using their own words. During filming we combined those planned contributions with more spontaneous responses, allowing each person to speak naturally while giving us the material needed to construct the wider story.

That was particularly important on a film moving between very different kinds of material. Patients were talking about deeply personal experiences, while the nurse and research scientist needed to communicate specialist healthcare and scientific work clearly. The film had to allow those voices to remain distinct while bringing them together into one coherent account of the charity.

One production, six films

The brand film was designed as part of a wider production rather than as a single standalone film. Alongside it, we produced five individual case studies, allowing the stories and areas of Anthony Nolan’s work introduced in the main film to be explored in greater depth.

Planning the films together meant the same production could deliver a central brand story and a suite of individual films for different communications needs, without simply creating shorter versions of the main film.