The UK Dementia Research Institute

A big part of what we do here at Storm & Shelter is taking information that’s given to us by a client, disseminating, discussing and then distilling it, and what we end up with is all of the necessary ingredients to make a delicious piece of content.

Now, not to blow our own trumpets, but we’re no slouches when it comes to science and technology—we’re self-confessed nerds and a few of our team may as well be professional pub quizzers. To pull our pants down (intellectually speaking) and completely stump us with a topic, you’d need to pull pretty hard.

Funnily enough, that’s exactly what our friends at the UKDRI (UK Dementia Research Institute) did when they approached us with the challenge of creating an informative piece of content, easily digestible yet informative, for both scientists and members of the general public. The newly built laboratory and office in Haydn Ellis (Cardiff University) was to be officially launched in October 2018, and this film was to coincide with that launch.

The UKDRI is a £250m initiative funded by the Medical Research Council, Alzheimer’s Society and Alzheimer’s Research UK, to find new ways to diagnose, treat, prevent and care for people with dementia.

Our in-house director, Kai, fancies himself as a bit of a dark horse, and so he lept at the opportunity to smash this one out. The real challenge of this project wasn’t so much about how to practically film it as much as it was about learning enough about what actually goes on at the DRI in order to know what to film at all!

We were introduced to seven scientists who worked for the UKDRI, all with different professions and areas of expertise. In order to include all seven in the film, Kai had the unenviable task of really getting to grips with several fields of research, painstakingly delving into the ways in which each department works individually, as well as how they collaborate together in order to form a compelling narrative.

The film itself was to feature all seven voices, and yet none of them was to be a voiceover, which presented a whole other challenge in its own right.

In classic Kai fashion, with little more than the occasional deep breath, he nonchalantly masterminded the project, leaving everyone in the office more surprised than the time he drove back from his home town in Germany with seven of his beloved guitars.

The film launched with a warm reception upon the grand opening of the new lab, leaving us in awe of the marvellous work that these next-level super geniuses do every single day.