Covid-19 Pandemic Institute Research Film

Client: University of Liverpool
Project: The Pandemic Institute

The University of Liverpool commissioned Slate and Mortar to produce a video animation aimed at staff, external stakeholders and partners, to highlight the world-leading research that the University had conducted in the fight against the Covid-19 Pandemic. The animation had to cover a significant number of research topics and weave through its narrative, an introduction to the brand new, world-class, University of Liverpool Pandemic Institute, built as a world-class facility, designed to tackle the challenges of any future pandemic.

There were a variety of challenges to consider during the early stages of the production of this particular project. In particular, there could be no filming on-site, as at the time of production, there were still restrictions in place due to the pandemic. This meant that all film assets had to be sourced from stock. Secondly, there were significant amounts of research and data to cover, so there was a real challenge in communicating its complexities within an acceptable duration, meaning a lot of time needed to be spent during the script-writing process. Finally, there is surprisingly little, high-quality stock footage of the City of Liverpool out there! It was essential for the commissioners to push the City of Liverpool and its contributions as part of the story, so this required plenty of research into archive materials.

Post-production took place primarily over the Winter and Spring of 2021/2022. The style of animation was agreed upon fairly quickly with probably the most significant amount of pre-production work being spent developing the script so that it included all the points of research the university wanted to cover, whilst still maintaining an engaging, agreeable tone. Video assets were sourced from many different online stock libraries and supplemented with the University’s archive of materials, which built up the majority of the edit timeline.

Once the edits were signed off, a voice-over artist was selected and the script was recorded in a professional studio before the videos were then taken into the final stage of post-production. Our in-house graphics team created complimentary, informative, and illustrative designs that were integrated into the edit, with designs and concepts that had been agreed on early and at this stage. In total, there were eight edit deliverables – a main film of 5-minutes, plus seven shorter, chaptered versions taken from the main edit.