CCU Fundraising Film

Kings College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is one of London’s largest and busiest teaching hospitals, providing a wide range of specialist and acute clinical services. The hospital’s Critical Care Unit is a world leader in the treatment of critically ill patients, and its fundraising arm works to enhance patient care beyond what NHS core funding can provide.

Kings College Hospital was fundraising to build a garden for its new 90-bed Critical Care Unit, with a target of raising £10 million. The hospital needed a flagship fundraising film that could work simultaneously as a piece of corporate donor communications and an emotionally compelling public appeal capable of moving individual donors and corporate sponsors alike to give at significant levels.

The film needed to communicate a specific piece of clinical evidence: that the hospital’s world-leading research had shown access to outdoor space during critical care recovery has a measurable positive impact on both physical and mental health outcomes for patients.

We built the film around Tom Lee, a patient, author and CCU survivor whose experience of the unit gave us a true story through which to communicate both the clinical evidence and the human reality of critical care recovery. Tom speaks to camera about the confusion, disorientation and psychological distress of his time in the CCU and how access to a garden during his recovery could have made a profound difference.

We filmed Tom in our London studio against a 30-foot screen playing a bespoke visual sequence in perfect sync with his story, using DMX-controlled ARRI lighting panels to vary the colour and mood of the image as he moved through the different emotional states of his experience.

The result is a film that is technically ambitious, cinematically distinctive and deeply human a production that respects both the intelligence of major donors and the emotional truth of the patient experience.

The film was released online and presented to corporate sponsors as the centrepiece of the hospital’s fundraising campaign. Kings College Hospital reached its full £10 million fundraising target in under a year, an exceptional result for an NHS charity campaign of this scale and ambition.