SeventhSlate films customer story videos in Aurora, Colorado. Aurora is fifteen minutes from us and the shoot itself is ordinary: one day, a small crew, two to four people interviewed, first cut in 48 hours. What is not ordinary is the permission layer. A story that would take a week to arrange in a Denver software office can take six weeks on the Anschutz campus, and the difference is entirely paperwork you can start today.
Three kinds of Aurora shoot, three different gatekeepers
Find your row before you find a budget. The lead times below are what we plan around, not promises an institution has made to us.
| Setting | Who has to clear it | Plan for | What we do differently |
|---|---|---|---|
| A clinic, practice or provider in the Anschutz medical corridor | Marketing or communications, plus the privacy office if a patient appears | 4–6 weeks | Written patient authorisation before we schedule, not on the day. We frame every shot so no other patient, chart, screen or badge is legible, and we hand over the raw files rather than archiving them if that is the condition of approval. |
| A defense or aerospace supplier, or anything touching Buckley Space Force Base | Your security lead, and base public affairs for on-installation work | 6–10 weeks, longer on base | We shoot off-installation wherever the story allows, which removes most of the delay. Where we can't, we submit a shot list in advance, work with an escort, and expect a review of footage before release. Cleared personnel talk about outcomes, never programmes. |
| A business, franchise or practice along Havana, in the office parks, or out toward E-470 | You, usually — plus a franchisor's brand team if you are part of a system | 1–2 weeks | Fastest work in the city. If you are a franchisee, we ask for the brand's video guidelines up front so the film is approvable the first time instead of after a round of logo notes. |
Why patient and employee stories are the hardest interviews to do honestly
A customer who runs their own company can push back on you. A patient in a gown, or an employee whose director is standing at the back of the room, cannot — and in our experience they will not even try. People are overwhelmingly willing to be directed. Tell someone their answer sounded good and they will give you a bigger version of it. Across 31 customer-story films we have delivered, exactly one subject has asked us to change the edit — and every one of them saw the cut first and could have asked for anything.
So consent is not the safeguard people assume it is. A signed release covers the right to use what was said; it does nothing about whether the sentence was true before the camera suggested it. In an institutional setting — where a subject already reads the room as something they should perform for — a leading question does not produce a weak answer. It manufactures a false one that the subject, the comms team and the audience will all approve.
Our rule is simple and it is the reason to hire a specialist: we ask open questions, we never supply the adjective, and if the strongest line in the interview was our idea, it does not go in the film. That is a smaller film sometimes. It is also one that holds up when a skeptical buyer or a journalist looks at it twice. The full argument is in our business storytelling guide.
Interviews in more than one language
Aurora is the most linguistically varied city in Colorado, and that is an asset in a customer story rather than a complication. When a subject's strongest language is not English, we film in it. We do not dub, because a dubbed testimonial reads as a re-enactment and loses the thing you filmed it for. We subtitle instead, burned in for social and as a separate caption file for your site, and we have the translation checked by someone other than the person who did it.
Practical note: allow an extra thirty minutes per interview and expect a slightly longer film. People say more, not less, when they are not translating themselves in real time.