OnSide: Owen's Story

Key Points

• Client: OnSide Youth Zones
• Project Type: Case Study
• Location: Dagenham & Central London
• Time Frame: 2025
• Deliverables: 1x hero film
• Key Features: First of an ongoing series

The Challenge

OnSide Youth Zones wanted to launch a new video series spotlighting their alumni: young people whose lives have been positively transformed by their experience at a Youth Zone. The first story? Owen’s. A charismatic and thoughtful young man who started at Future, the Dagenham Youth Zone, and is now thriving, having studied law at university and begun a professional career.

The challenge was to visually and emotionally capture the full arc of Owen’s journey: from the basketball courts of his local Youth Zone to the boardrooms of central London. And, importantly, to build a film format that could evolve into a recognisable, repeatable series for future alumni stories.

The Plan

We knew that to make this video land, we had to tell Owen’s story with scope and emotional weight — but also with cohesion and clarity. So we built a visual structure that allowed us to do both.

We started with locations.
We filmed across a mix of settings that helped give the film a sense of place while reflecting Owen’s journey:

• Central London, where he now works in law
• Future Youth Zone in Dagenham, where it all began
• Boardroom-style scenes, reflecting his current role on the Youth Zone board
• Sporting shots, showing Owen in his element playing basketball and football

We layered in meaningful relationships.
Owen’s mentor, Gershom, the CEO of the Youth Zone, joined the film as a secondary voice. We interviewed him and filmed him with Owen, bringing warmth and context to the story. Their bond was clear and grounding, adding richness to the emotional thread.

We future-proofed the format.
This wasn’t a one-off. It was the first in a new series. So we created a grid structure , a wall of portrait photos of Youth Workers that appears at the beginning and end of the film. At the end, Owen’s portrait is added to the grid, a symbolic passing of the baton. As more alumni films are made, more portraits will join. A visual device to connect the series and celebrate a growing legacy.

The Results

Owen’s story became the perfect foundation for OnSide’s new alumni series; rich in emotion, visually dynamic, and grounded in authenticity. The film captured not just one young man’s transformation, but the wider impact of what Youth Zones can do.

It now stands as a flagship video for OnSide, launching a cohesive and scalable series format, and giving future alumni stories a visual and emotional blueprint to build from.

The hero film and cutdowns have equipped the OnSide team with a flexible suite of content:

• Emotional storytelling for internal stakeholders
• Inspiring narratives for public audiences
• Short, shareable edits for social impact

Above all, this project reminded us of something simple but powerful: that the right story, told the right way, can make people stop, watch, and feel.