The Rebranding Journey
Montefiore Nyack Hospital started serving its immediate community in Nyack, NY, in 1900, always with a focus on community and connection. Over the past decade, though, it’s grown from a community facility to a multifaceted, highly-modernized hospital, expanding its physical footprint and adding new departments & technology. Through its evolution, their mission of community has remained the same.
Nine years ago, Montefiore Nyack Hospital brought Grey Sky Films onto its team of multimedia partners, and since then we’ve been proud to witness and capture the monumental growth this organization has undergone. Most recently, we filmed a 30 second spot – along with social media content – for their rebrand campaign, through which they rolled out their first-ever tagline: Your Health, Our Mission.
The goal of the rebrand was to connect the community with the hospital and its staff, focusing on two key facets:
Montefiore Nyack’s marketing team and stakeholders were inspired by the “Visit California” commercials, where different groups or individuals are in beautiful, widely-varied locations, while saying lines that were interwoven. They asked us to create something visually stunning with this reference in mind, that would showcase different hospital departments, as well as staff roles, including everyone from IT and maintenance, to nurses and aides, and technicians across the board. They also wanted the video to authentically reflect their culture, as well as their community. So, they considered doing something less common: having their staff members star in the video. Because who better to tell the hospital’s story than the people who commit to living their mission day to day?
After receiving these ideas, we collaboratively developed a more detailed vision for the production. We finetuned a script and crafted a shot list that would capture each cast member from the staff saying a line, as filming would move through the hospital to highlight various departments. We knew from experience that filming in an active hospital has unique challenges, so our pre-production process was appropriately thorough. To ensure that things came together seamlessly on the day-of, everything was pre-planned and we were prepared with contingencies for every foreseeable eventuality. We scouted the location twice to ensure that we knew exactly how we’d execute. Our production team and client rehearsed various scenarios and streamlined the set of gear we’d bring, making sure we’d optimize moving the crew safely through each area as we filmed, taking care to be considerate of patients and clinicians. We took some time to learn from our client about the participating staff members, so that we could understand them and their level of comfort in front of the camera. And finally, to ensure the utmost attention to healthcare industry regulations and patient privacy, we hired actors to play the patients.
We built a full-scale team for this production, including hair & makeup, wardrobe, set design, and catering. The shoot took place over the course of 4 days, and was designed to highlight multiple locations throughout the hospital. Four days provided our multifaceted team ample time to work their magic, and gave the crew the time needed to work around everyday hospital operations. Mark dedicated the beginning of each shoot day to coaching the participating staff members, so everyone could feel confident and ready for their turn in front of the camera.
While the staff members and actors were in hair, makeup, wardrobe, or coaching, our production team was ensuring that every detail across the hospital was ready for filming, from what was hanging on the walls and displayed on computer screens, to adding flowers and other comforting touches to each department. And given how unique a hospital is as a filming location, there was a lot to do.
We knew we’d be filming in critical locations, such as the pediatric emergency room and the cardiac lab, so we took this into consideration when scheduling and planning our shots. As prepared and organized as we were, there was still some real-time need to be nimble, like adjusting the shoot schedule around unexpected emergencies, and pivoting realtime to film social media shots in front of a green screen. Because we’d done this sort of shoot (and so many others!) before, our team knew what to do.
If you follow us on social media, you’ll see us talking a lot about something we’re very passionate about: creating a 360o ecosystem. In today’s world, commercials and streaming video spots are often only part of the big picture, and we love helping our clients walk away getting the most out of their investment in video production. So we always think about and bring up ways we can create multipurpose content that can be used across channels and platforms, like our clients’ socials and websites.
For the Montefiore Nyack Hospital rebrand project, this was part of the overarching plan from the beginning. So, during pre-production, we also took into account the types of shots we wanted to capture for social media and streaming contexts. We captured multiple takes, with specific delivery methods in mind, in order to end up with cross-channel content. For example, for the full 30-second video spot, each employee says a partial sentence.
For social media, we filmed vertically to ensure the shots were perfectly-suited to these platforms, and we filmed each employee making complete statements. In the end, the client received 28 pieces of content in total, including a 30-second streaming-focused video spot, and several sets of additional content to leverage elsewhere.
The team at Grey Sky Films are consummate professionals and were very respectful wherever they went. When we did the shoot for “Your Health, Our Mission, Mark & Dana ran the show, and it was exciting for all of us to see them in action. Everything was preplanned so they were ready for anything. Cathy and Dana worried over minute details—things like catering, what time meals would happen, and was the schedule set up perfectly down to the minute.
They were ready to leave each area on a dime because the hospital was actively taking care of patients; the crew had a huge amount of gear and had to be mobile & nimble to successfully work within the environment. Mark took the time to learn about each & every cast member from the staff so he could be prepared to coach them and make them feel comfortable the day-of.
And here’s sort of a sidenote: Montefiore Nyack Hospital is within NYC’s studio zone (a certain radius extending outward from Columbus Circle in Manhattan as defined by film-related unions), so we’ve had the opportunity to serve as the location for some fairly big productions. “The Following” starring Kevin Bacon is one example. And I can honestly say: Grey Sky Films operates with the same level of professionalism, process, and quality as these Hollywood crews.
