Manchester Pride Parade - The Movie Client

Journeying back to the founding years of pride in Manchester and the wider fight for gay rights within the UK, this documentary explores the darkness the LGBTQ+ community has fought against over the last 50 years.

Read the case study on the McGill Production website

Manchester Pride are one of the UK's leading LGBTQ+ charities. Every August bank holiday, they host their annual pride festival, drawing in tens of thousands of people. The weekend is made up of various events, including Superbia, the Gay Village Party, and the famous Manchester Pride Parade. Ticket sales from events and activities help raise money for a number of LGBTQ+ charities.

‍Due to Coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the festival was brought online to give the community a place to celebrate. Pride needed a replacement for the feature of the weekend - the Parade - and asked us to produce a short documentary exploring the history of the event.

After various in-depth meetings with their team, we decided to create a short documentary that would cover the history and significance of the LGBT movement in the UK, highlighting the parade.

This would allow us to utilise our love and experience of story-telling with our focus on telling emotive, moving narratives, while also highlighting many of the points that were important to the organisation. The film itself would look back in time, exploring the challenges the LGBTQ+ community faced, and how far the movement has come into the last 50 years

Having built a strong relationship with Pride over the preceding 3 years, we presented a storyboard that outlined the video structure.

We had a tight deadline to deliver the piece, but were happy to meet this given our ties with the charity and our ambition to create something powerful.

We began editing the piece at the start of August, with our in-house editors spending a number of days sourcing archive footage from the BBC, Getty Images and YouTube amongst other places. The video was additionally cut together using footage from previous years of the festival, which we had captured with our RED cameras and anamorphic lenses.

We filmed further 'I March For...' pieces to camera at the Castlefield Bowl, Manchester with members of the LGBT+ community. The footage was shot in 5K on our RED Scarlet-W camera, enabling us to capture every detail with brilliant clarity and colour.

We delivered the full 15-minute feature film, a trailer-teaser, and three social edits for future promotion of 2021 tickets, optimised for social use.

We submitted the piece into a number of film festivals, with it being selected by Manchester Film Festival in the UK, Melbourne Lift-Off Festival in Australia, Fear No Film in Utah, and Beeston Film Festival in Nottinghamshire, ultimately winning in the 'A Better Place' category at the latter.