Meet The Makers: Nova Studios launching special video series with The Yorkshire Post Magazine

The work of Nova Studios has taken their team all over the world. But their next project is one that has trained its focus very much on their home region.

The video production company is collaborating with The Yorkshire Post on a new series called Meet The Makers, shining a light on the stories of some of this region’s most remarkable and inspiring craftspeople.

Hull-based Nova has been hard at work over the past year creating a very special series of short films that will accompany a set of weekly features running in The Yorkshire Post Magazine from next Saturday. The series will start with Hebden Bridge-based jeweller Toby Cotterill and go on to cover a local potter, bicycle maker and fashion designer amongst others in the coming weeks.

Those featured in the series are inspiring in their own right but the people behind the camera are also very much talented craftspeople in their own field of emotive storytelling.

Nova began in 2007 as a partnership between musician-turned-filmmaker Alan Jones and ex-Hull Daily Mail journalist Matt Stephenson.

Now a team of six, including Matt’s son and fellow former journalist Barney, the company produces videos for a vast array of clients – but all with a focus on finding the human element in even the most commercial of videos.

Jones says the a breakthrough moment for the company came when it was selected to support Hull’s bid to become City of Culture in 2017 and created a widely-praised film called This City Belongs To Everyone.

It got hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, was shown on BBC Breakfast and the News at 10 as well as at Hull City games and became such a hit that Match of The Day even made a parody of it.

The bid was successful – thanks at least in some part to the persuasive video – and Nova was used to make films during the year of culture, including a set of films in Sierra Leone in Hull’s twin city Freetown that compared the lives of people living there with their counterparts here.

Nova also curated and supplied an archive of films, newspapers and photographs that told Hull’s story over 80 years for the Made in Hull lightshow which helped kick off the year of culture.

Jones says the team was also particularly proud of a documentary it was commissioned to make as part of the year called Mind On The Run: The Basil Kirchin Story.

It told the story of a pioneering musician and film score composer who fell into obscurity and an anonymous life in Hull before his work began to be rediscovered by younger generations. The documentary was named as Sight and Sounds magazine’s top 100 films for 2017 and is still available to watch via Vimeo.

The company is currently working on feature-length documentaries including the story of footballer Alhassan ‘Crespo’ Kamara, who they first met in 2009 and Freetown. It follows his globe-trotting attempts to make it in the professional over more than a decade.

They are also making a documentary about musician and artist Paul Burwell provisionally titled Over the Edge.

Their varied range of commercial clients in recent times has included everyone from the Devonshire Group, which looks after Chatsworth and Bolton Abbey, to Tracy Brabin’s West Yorkshire Combined Authority and major local businesses in the Hull region such as KCOM, Beal Homes and Wykeland.

Barney says whatever the job or project, their unique selling point is to draw out the human story behind the brief they have been given.

"We like to be as people focused as possible.”

Alan adds: “There have been so many times where people have said our video has made them cry.”

Matt explains: “Getting some emotion in there and not just being corporate is so important to us. We don’t want to put words into people’s mouths – you have to get people speaking honestly and openly and commenting on their own experiences.”

Alan says: “If the person feels at ease, you end up with a much more honest and emotional film.”

In addition to the trio speaking to The Yorkshire Post for this article, the close-knit team also includes Lina Chaouki, Callum Mitchell and Lydia Shearsmith.

Nova pitched the idea of working with The Yorkshire Post last year and Matt says the project has been a very fulfilling one for the team.

“A lot of the time we are shooting for corporate clients and working to a brief. We thought it would be nice to have more control of the brief and push ourselves a bit in terms of the storytelling.

"We also want to reach a wider Yorkshire audience. We are really well known in this neck of the woods but it is nice to get some exposure across Yorkshire. It felt like a win-win.”

Barney adds: “We have a lot of time with the interviewees and it has been really rewarding to sit with people and go off on different tangents.”

The Nova team are hopeful the collaboration could lead to prospective new clients getting in touch.

Matt says: "Yorkshire brands tend to be quite proud of being from Yorkshire and we see a lot of people who are proud of where they are from and what they are doing.

"We just want to talk to anybody who wants a story told for commercial reasons or creative reasons. We think we have a fairly unique offer in the North.”

He says there are no grand ambitions for expanding the business – which is based in a house that has been converted into an office environment – beyond continuing to do high-quality work the team are passionate about.

"We want the business to keep growing but it is always going to stay relatively small and professional.”