The MS Walk

The Society ran the day. Bizbio was there to make the videos the walk needed — five of them, for the campaign around the event. It was a charitable job: the videos were made for the Society, not for a sponsor.

Those five videos were given to the Society. Its receipt is dated 3 May 2015 and describes them in its own words: five promotional videos for the London walk, a gift in kind, valued at $2,542.50. That is the arrangement, on the charity’s own paper.

A gift in kind is the plainest version of this: the Society received the videos, valued them at $2,542.50, and issued a receipt for tax purposes. The receipt is still in the job folder. It is how we know what the work was, and it is the only fee this job ever had — nothing.

A day like that runs on a clock nobody controls. The walk starts early and it is over by noon. Everyone arrives at once. The route is a loop, so the same faces come past twice — and the second time they are tired and better value than the first.

The speeches happen while people are still arriving, so you choose between the podium and the path, and you are wrong either way unless there are two cameras. There was one.

That camera shot about two hundred clips and forty-six stills, in one continuous run of file numbers, the stills and the footage interleaved in the order they were taken. One body, one day, no second unit.

Five videos came out of it, and two of them are on our own channel: the feature at the top of this page runs nine minutes, and the two-minute showcase is the short version of it. Both went up in February 2016, five days apart.

The edits were cut afterwards, and the project’s own files date the finish to February 2016 — the cut, and four graphics renders built with it: a Hope piece, the logo animation, a lower third and a transition. Nothing about the day changed in the meantime.

The job survives whole. Its folder holds three hundred and sixteen files from the day itself, with the stills sitting in a subfolder beside the footage the way the crew left them; the edit keeps two project files, one of them named for the date, plus a rough cut and eighteen auto-saves. Nothing here had to be reconstructed to write this page.

That the videos were given rather than sold is the part worth saying plainly. A charity’s walk has a budget for the walk, and five promotional videos were not in it.

The forty-six stills are the part still working. They are the day itself, in order, from the same camera that shot the footage — and each one carries the record control, so a reader can see where it came from.

We do not put a number on what a campaign achieved, and the Society’s figures are the Society’s to publish. What the record holds is smaller and checkable: the date, the arrangement, the videos, and the photographs.

This one was a gift.

DIRECTOR · BRYAN BAKKER