Mark Foden has worked with Bramble for over four years. He talks about some out-of-the-ordinary videos his business – Eggvids - has made for Bramble - variously involving jazz bands, Victorian bathers, wing-walkers and false-teeth vendors...

I'm a change strategy specialist; I'm particularly interested in communications. My video-making began in 2013. I'd been trying, and failing desperately, to write a blog post about how digital technology might change the innards of government: the idea of Government as a Platform. It was tricky. I drew dozens of diagrams to explain it to myself and it occurred to me that moving pictures not stationary words were needed. I also realised that anything I made would need to be a bit different if anyone was to pay the faintest bit of attention to it. So I made a 3-minute video called the Gubbins of Government. It worked. Thousands watched it, hundreds liked it and many are still using it in presentations, on courses and (I'd like to think) to alleviate the boredom of long winter nights.

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Quite a few people have since asked me to make videos for them. So my video business Eggvids was... er... laid. It now employs a Digital Hen - Mark Hainge - and on its shell it says we make simple, catchy videos that explain complicated stuff.

In 2014, I met Richard Archer, the founder of Bramble. We were involved with Open Forum Europe - a group promoting openness in the technology industry. Richard had seen the video and asked if I would make something similar to explain Bramble Hub. This is it...

 
 

During the routine hubbub of life our brains filter out the ordinary. It's a genetic hunter-gatherer thing: collect berries and don't get distracted by anything but unusual stuff like grumpy mammoths and hungry-looking tigers with long teeth. Only the unexpected gets through.

So Eggvids tend to be unusual: fast-paced, visceral and rudimentary with dissonant pictures and an enthusiastic commentary. They use metaphor with strong images to get across abstract concepts and humour to make things catch in the mind. We love making them. They are a lot of fun to do and it's so satisfying when folk say they made a difference to them.

The Bramble Hub video was popular with partners, clients, customers and crucially people who work in the business. One said the video gave them confidence because they had a simple, clear model in their head, which they didn't have before. We've since made three more videos to explain other parts of Bramble - these are linked below.

Bramble is a different kind of business with an innovative business model, genuinely exciting ideas and very nice people. (And I'm not just saying that.) It was fab to be given the licence to do something different.

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The videos

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