UNLOC x Peer Action Collective: Giving Young Changemakers a Voice
Sixty young people. Five campaigns. One mission to make their communities safer.
Youth charity video production for UNLOC and the Peer Action Collective, telling the real stories of 60 young people across Portsmouth and Southampton who set out to tackle violence in their own communities.
Key points
- Client: UNLOC, local delivery partner for the Peer Action Collective
- Programme funded by the Youth Endowment Fund and the #iwill Fund
- Six individual story films plus a staff overview, cut together into one long form documentary
- Four shoot days across Portsmouth and Southampton
- Six person crew, dual RED Digital Cinema cameras and drone
- Sensitive subjects handled with care, led by the young people’s own words
The challenge
The Peer Action Collective is a youth-led network, funded by the Youth Endowment Fund and the #iwill Fund, that helps young people live a life free from violence. UNLOC ran the programme locally, bringing together 60 young people from Portsmouth and Southampton, two cities not always known for working side by side, to research the causes of youth violence and lead their own social action projects.
By the end of the change-maker phase, those young people had built campaigns on knife crime, sexual assault awareness, bullying and cyber-bullying. Some had gone on to speak in Parliament. The challenge for us was to capture all of that in charity video that felt honest and powerful, without sensationalising difficult subjects or putting words in anyone’s mouth. The story had to come from the young people themselves.
The plan
We built the project as a set of individual journeys that could stand alone and also come together as one film. Rather than a single overview video, we filmed each young person telling their own story in their own words, then wove those stories into a long form documentary that captured the scale of the whole programme. This is the kind of story-led film that works because it is real, not scripted.
The films we produced included Levy and Leo’s Put The Knives Down campaign, made with Portsmouth Football Club, Ace’s Teal Umbrella project on sexual assault awareness, Katie’s journey from low confidence to speaking in Parliament, Sasha and Katie’s anti-bullying work taking young people’s voices into schools, and Poppy’s cyber-bullying documentary. A staff film gave the programme leaders space to reflect on what they had seen. Every separate story was then delivered together as one long form piece, the kind of brand and organisational film that gives a programme a lasting record.
We filmed across four days at locations including Portsmouth Guildhall, Goals Portsmouth, Victoria Park and Portsmouth Football Club, clearing each location in advance so the shoots ran smoothly. Our crew of six, director, assistant camera, director of photography, sound, runner and on-set stills photographer, shot on dual RED Digital Cinema cameras for an A and B camera setup, with drone footage adding scale to the exterior scenes. To capture smooth, dynamic movement at the outdoor locations, our DP used an easyrig(camera stabilisation system) while riding a one wheel(single-wheeled electric skateboard), a technique he is highly proficient in, giving the films a fluid, cinematic feel without the bulk of traditional rigs.
Throughout, the priority was care. These are real young people speaking about real experiences, so the direction was gentle, the pace was theirs, and the edit always kept them at the centre of their own story.
The results
The finished films captured something genuinely rare: young people describing, in their own words, the moment they realised they could make a difference. The individual journeys gave each project its own voice, while the long form documentary showed the full reach of the programme, from a residential weekend to young people reaching out to professionals and stakeholders independently, and in several cases going on to speak in Parliament and at national events.
For UNLOC and the Peer Action Collective, the films became a lasting record of the change-maker phase and a powerful tool for showing funders, partners and future participants exactly what youth-led social action looks like. It is work that sits alongside our wider video production case studies as some of the most meaningful we have made. For the young people, it was their story, told properly, and kept.
What the client said
“Creation DMC are fantastic to work with. After working with the team on multiple occasions they really put their all into the whole process, from the initial touch point to delivery, as well as making everyone in the room feel so at ease. Highly recommend.”
Jess Cowling, UNLOC
Tell your story properly
Every organisation has stories worth telling. We will help you tell yours with the same care and craft we brought to this one. We are a video production team based in Hampshire, working with charities and youth organisations across Portsmouth, Southampton and beyond. Explore our charity video production work, or book a free discovery call to talk it through.