Production · Post · Social
CAE
Women building careers in aviation, in their own words.
Production · Post · Social
Women building careers in aviation, in their own words.
01 The brief
CAE are one of the world's largest aviation training organisations. They're the ones who teach the people who fly the planes. Operating in over 35 countries, they train more than 220,000 civil and military crew every year. When they needed a production partner for a series of films tied to their Women in Flight initiative, they came to us on recommendation.
Women in Flight exists to address one of commercial aviation's most persistent problems: the significant gender imbalance in its cockpits. Fewer than 6% of the world's airline pilots are women. CAE's programme works to change that by recruiting, supporting and championing women through pilot training at every stage.
The films needed to reflect that ambition. The brief wasn't a corporate recruitment video with music you've heard on 5 other films this week and an AI voiceover. The goal was something that felt like an honest conversation with people doing something difficult and worth shining a light on.
02 What we did
The reference CAE brought us was the kind of staged but still intimate walk-and-talk you'd see on Vogue's social media - the subject moving through the environment, talking naturally to an audience POV camera while the producer asks the questions unseen.
We shot four films across CAE's vast training facility in Crawley with Bisma, Cindy, Lauren and Georgina. We mic'd each one and filmed them in a single extended take, occasionally using in-camera moves to hide transitions. As well as Ed directing, our crew included a DOP, AC, gaffer and sound op, all battery-powered to stay mobile through a building that size. Jimmy, our gaffer, worked with a small COB light firing through a boomed lantern - soft and flattering but still punchy enough to fill any dark corners of the giant flight bays.
It was the hottest day of the year. One of the simulators had overheated the day before, taking it out of action, so our callsheet had a bold highlighted note reminding everyone of the iced water in our wheeled cooler.
03 The result
The success of a format like this depends entirely on whether the subject feels comfortable and not contrived. Meeting a crew of strangers with lots of lumps of metal and glass and then being expected to perform for them is a daunting thing. Good directors and lovely crew can go a long way. We took four people who'd never done anything like this before, on a sweltering day, and got all four in single takes.