How to Direct And Film Children
July 30, 2018
30th July 2018 by CH
They say you should never work with animals or children, but filming with kids isn’t as difficult as it sounds.
Along with the compulsory performance licenses and guidelines you need to follow, here’s some extra tips to help you prepare.
Make Sure They’re Entertained
Film sets can be interesting and fun for kids to be a part of. But there’s a lot of waiting around time, whether it’s waiting for kit to be set up or just waiting for their turn on camera. It’s not unusual for your talent to be hanging around on set for a while.
To prevent frustrated and tired child actors, keep the filming time to a minimum and if they’re really young, make sure there’s a chaperone or parent with activities like colouring books and plenty of refreshments to keep everybody happy and relaxed.
Cut Back on Set Up Times
Try to avoid long filming hours. Remove unnecessary set up time. Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin from BBC’s Outnumbered would keep their shoots fast and flexible by using less lighting, no makeup department and other stages that are usually associated with film production.
Make sure you cover all of this during your pre-production process and have a good plan in place from the start.
Directing Children
Most video Producers and Directors will be very personable and have lots of experience working with different types of people, ages and backgrounds. And more often than not, if the child is used to being in front of the camera, they will be happy enough to take direction and want to improve their performance as much as you want them to.
Kids are pretty smart and can be quite attentive if you speak to them correctly and make sure actions are simple enough. Dialogue is a slightly different story, but if you have patience and a good attitude on set, you’ll be surprised by the outcome.
One thing we find particularly effective is to speak slowly and physically act out what you need them to do, so they can see what you want. Whether that’s a simple movement, an expression or a line of dialogue, it’s a good idea to be clear.
Our Latest Videos Featuring Children
Enough talking, time for some action. Here’s a couple of recent examples from some of the projects we’ve worked on that involved filming with children.
Make sure to follow our tips and you can enjoy a great end result, as children can bring a unique energy and emotion to every video.
Thames Water – Sibley Family Video ‘Why Pipes Freeze’
Royal Caribbean – ‘Cruise From Southampton’ Video
Still need a helping hand when it comes to filming with children? We’re only an email away .
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When Euronics came to us with a brief, it was a good one: take a true story about an extraordinary delivery and turn it into something worth watching. The Brief Joe, a Euronics delivery agent, had been tasked with getting a chest freezer to a customer in rural Wales. The road ran out. He carried on anyway, on foot, through fields, across rivers and over hills. The customer was delighted. The story deserved to be told. Euronics asked us to produce a short comedic video retelling that journey. The challenge was finding the right visual language to match the scale of the tale. The Concept We pitched several approaches centred on a comic-book aesthetic, bold, energetic and a little tongue-in-cheek. It felt like the right fit: a story that was equal parts heroic and absurd, told in a style that leaned into both. The concept paired real interview footage of Joe with AI-generated visuals to bring his journey to life. Where a traditional shoot would have required location days across Welsh countryside, generative AI gave us the tools to illustrate the story scene by scene. Creative Wrangling We filmed Joe against a studio blue backdrop, letting him tell the story in his own words. His delivery did a lot of the heavy lifting (puns intended!), dry, matter-of-fact and quietly brilliant. The AI-generated visuals were built around detailed multi-angle reference sheets for Joe, the Euronics van and the chest freezer.
Generative AI can easily open doors to help create bespoke, crafted content to elevate a video beyond the usual approaches. Recently we tested the latest AI tools to create vast scenic landscapes, humorous underwater worlds and visual effects shots for several campaigns. The tools have advanced a long way over the last few years and the barriers to creating believable or imaginative worlds are fading away all the time. Need an underwater disco full of dancing fish? Got it. A speaking anthropomorphic clown fish? Absolutely. The Key is Consistency It was key to ensure a good amount of consistency across each video. We created multi-angle reference sheets of characters and key objects and use node-based tools to link these, and additional brand references, to ensure the look was maintained throughout. The tools are now in a place where you can also direct and control the results much more closely. Camera moves, lens choices and lighting can be defined and adjusted to get closer to the image or video that you’re looking for and as the creative options expand, options for creativity within each shot expand infinitely.
We're thrilled to announce that we won not one, or two, but THREE Lens Awards at Communicate Magazine's prestigious awards event. We won awards for best One-off Video Campaign (Bronze) and Best Lifestyle and Wellbeing (Gold) for our work with Essity , a global hygiene and health leader that trusted us to transform essential H&S by producing a fresh and memorable induction video for visitors to their historic Oakenholt Mill. Delivering key messages with humour and heart, our approach stars children from real Essity employees as the mill’s pint-sized operators. It was a silver for Best Live or Experiential Video, celebrating our cinematic event work with PepsiCo . The Away from Home team’s breakout room at an international conference contained five ultrawide 4K screens stretching nearly 30 meters. Where we delivered 20 videos and nearly 70 assets overall, blending real footage, AI generated visuals, and synchronised side-screen magic. A panoramic feel that supported our client’s event in a whole new way. Thank you to our awesome team of in-house creatives. Photographed, a delegation from CH attended the event on behalf of the whole company.
