A relative newcomer, I joined Brouha to produce and manage video communications in-house, and by the time Brouha celebrates its 20 year anniversary later this year I will have been here 18 months.
I can’t claim their two decades of experience in the areas of Social Housing, Fenestration and Built environment but I can tell you what its taught me already, and its more than I expected.
I came to Brouha from a background in corporate communications, where I was more used to filming in offices and studios than on a residential doorstep. My first project changed that fairly quickly. It was for one of Brouha's social housing clients, and it involved filming their operatives at work inside a resident's family home. It was a lovely, lively household: an extended family with people coming and going all afternoon, and, in the middle of it, a lady who was babysitting her granddaughter and dog-sitting at the same time. It was about as far from a controlled studio set-up as you can get, but it turned out to be a brilliant introduction to the people and situations our social housing clients actually serve.
That first shoot has stuck with me because it set the tone for how I think about the work now. You cannot manufacture a moment like that, and you shouldn't try. Real operatives doing real work, in a real home, with a real family carrying on around them, is exactly the kind of authenticity that gives a piece of video its weight, and it's the opposite of what a lot of content is becoming. As flashy, AI-generated videos get more common, with their oddly smooth, uncanny valley feel, the value of something genuinely real only grows. Our clients, and the people they serve, can tell the difference.
People’s day-to-day experience of consuming media and information; smartphones, tablets, laptops, naturally leads to an expectation for video content in marketing messaging, making video an increasingly important way for organisations to reach their target audience. Changes in technology has increasingly democratised video production reducing size and costs, but the use of AI generated video risks flattening the field to the point customers and users are unable to differentiate between marketing offerings and scams and risks customer blanket rejection of all such messages. To counter that video messaging has to be more authentic and carefully 'concierged' to ensure the message resonates with customers rather than simply attempts to visually impress them. When AI can make anything, nothing impresses any more.
It's not enough for a video to look good; it has to speak to the actual concerns of the people watching it, whether that's a resident wanting reassurance about safety works in their home, or a customer wanting to know a job will be done properly and with respect for their space. Authentic footage and a well targeted message go hand in hand, and getting both right is where I think our work earns its keep.
Being the person behind the camera, and increasingly behind the edit too, has given me a different vantage point on the business than most. I've filmed site visits mid-retrofit, interviewed people who've spent their whole careers in this sector, and sat in edit suites piecing stories together with precision as well as warmth. It's a strange mix of technical and human, and I like that about the job.
If you'd told me when I started that I'd end up nearly as fluent in social housing policy and building safety regulation as I am in frame rates and colour grading, I'm not sure I'd have believed you. But that's the thing about Brouha: it asks you to bring your whole skillset to bear on subjects that genuinely matter, and somewhere along the way you find yourself caring about the outcomes as much as the output.
At the time I joined Brouha also brought graphic design in-house, meaning we can take an idea from a first conversation with a client through to a finished campaign, video included, without handing pieces of it off elsewhere. This gives us more control, flexibility and speed to achieve the clients' goals and provide a better client experience.
I'm grateful to Brouha for building something worth joining, to the rest of the team for making the day-to-day such good fun, and to every client who's let us into their sites, call centres, boardrooms, and into their residents' homes, with a camera.
Happy 20th birthday Brouha! Here's to another 20 years of communicating with video, camera in hand, ready for whatever comes next.