Taking Our Time to Find the Right Story

The Beautiful Humans movement produces one film each month to invite people to reflect and consider what makes someone beautiful. For our January film, we were now filming over multiple days, giving us a solid ninety minute block for interviewing and then a multi-hour period for b-roll filming in other locations.

Telling the story of our January feature, Christian Pullings, proved far trickier than we expected. Our first attempts at the story fell short. In having a ninety minute interview, we had a number of paths we could take with the story. 

The story editing took extra rounds, and we nailed it. We were able to identify the story that we believed would be most impactful to our members and viewers.

We wanted to end with Christian’s quote about finding our worth where we are to make the road we travel easier, but getting there was tricky. We had so many sections about his dad we had to cut out because they just didn’t build to the message we wanted to share. This is the challenging reality of film and storytelling.

The feedback from our community was exceptional. Not only do our guests love how we reflect their beauty, our members loved how this story flowed.

Having hours of b-roll footage for a ~ fifteen-minute short film is wonderful. It makes our job easier in terms of creating a powerful product, yet also harder because we have so many more options to sift through. We don’t have to “make it work” with a limited pool of content.

We also took more time to explore with the music on this film. Our films that focus on trauma all have a far more narrow window of options for moods and feels. With our Beautiful Humans films, we can explore the musicality so freely. And then to be featuring a choreographer, it just made it that much more fun to experiment. We tested more songs on this film than any other so far.