Story Background
This past summer, we had the opportunity to work with The Wesleyan Church, headquartered in Fishers, Indiana, to tell David Henry’s story. David contracted COVID-19 in early March of 2020. Within a short time, he ended up in the hospital, fighting for his life on a ventilator. Miraculously, David has made a near complete recovery. While he was sedated in the hospital, a whole community of people came around his wife and 11 children.
Planning
The story that the church wanted to tell was obviously the story of David’s miraculous recovery, but also they wanted to focus on how the community rallied around his family during this time. We spent a couple hours chatting with David and his wife Michelle and quickly learned the challenge of this story was going to narrowing down what to share and how far to go with certain aspects. There were plenty of good angles we could use — it was just a matter of figuring out the right one. Another challenge we faced was that, of course, we had no footage from David’s time in the hospital — only a few photos he took before being sedated and a couple the hospital staff took for him. The support for David and his family originated on Facebook and so we wanted to figure out how to incorporate those posts in a way that added some movement to the story.
So with that in mind, we set out to highlight the family’s connection to the church, the story of David’s illness, the community response, and the outcome of the whole story. Because we had so much to get through, the story was either broken up by title slides or music changes to help the viewer process.
We worked with Aaron Fussner, the former Communications Director at The Wesleyan Church, to produce this video.
Links
The Wesleyan Church does a fantastic job of sharing stories throughout their organization. In an episode of our Marketing & Engagement Podcast we chat with Tricia Rife, who also works in the Communication Department at The Wesleyan Church. Click here to listen!
