Ferndale House Dental Practice. Two days of filming, planned on twelve pages.

Leo Duran became Ferndale House’s owner in November 2018. A year later Dr Paula Brennan of WeLoveTeeth, a client of ours, recommended us to him, and we met at the practice that September.

Most dental websites are lists of treatments, qualifications and equipment. Our proposal argued for something else:

In practice that meant real photographs and films rather than stock: the practice itself, the dentists in their own words, and patients telling their own stories. The practice was being refurbished that autumn, so we planned the shoot for the new year.

Good footage starts long before the camera comes out. Four days before the shoot we sent the practice a twelve-page plan, written as a shared Google Doc, so everyone knew what would happen on the day and why. It opened with some ground rules:

• “All photos should have someone in them”: no empty surgeries or rooms
• People doing something real: looking at X-rays, running through a treatment plan, explaining a treatment to a child
• “Patients / subjects need to look happy!”
• “We will not take any photos of dental tools and equipment!”
• Dress the practice first: clean, de-cluttered, with flowers and plants in reception

Then a shot list for the photographs, fourteen b-roll shots for the films, from “2 dentists walking through corridor towards camera” to the town’s crooked spire, and questions for Leo, the other dentists and the facial aesthetics practitioner. They were prompts, not a script:

The questions for patients were about their story rather than the treatment: what brought them to the practice, what changed, and one sentence to sum it up. And the plan looked beyond the two days, with a release form for everyone filmed and a checklist so the practice’s own staff could film patient stories later: white balance, microphones on, landscape not portrait, and “They will be nervous! Try and put them at ease!”

On the Friday we put up a grey backdrop upstairs and photographed every member of the team, then the groups: on the stairs by the stained-glass window, in reception, and looking up the stairwell from above, one of the plan’s “interesting angles”.

On the Saturday the upstairs waiting room became an interview set, with the practice’s own teal wall, a sideboard and a vase of yellow flowers, lit and ready before the first interview. Between interviews we filmed patients’ stories, with their consent, and the b-roll: dentists walking the corridor towards the camera, the stained glass, reception, the building and, as the light went, Chesterfield’s crooked spire.

The kit was kept simple enough to set up in a working practice: a Panasonic GH5 shooting 4K, lavalier microphones and a separate recorder, an LED panel and a softbox, a grey card for white balance, and the pop-up backdrop.

We started the edit on 17 March 2020. A week later the practice had to close for lockdown and the project paused; we kept the old site’s notices to patients up to date until it could restart in August.

The new site went to the practice for review on 14 August and live on 10 September 2020, built in WordPress around the photographs, with every old address redirected. On the home page a full-width photograph sits behind a white logo, and the form for new patients is the main call to action.

The plan had a word of warning about group photos: “If someone leaves, it is out of date.” So the team page was built from the individual portraits, and it changes as the team does.

The edit ran from mid-September to early October 2020. The practice film is cut from the interviews and the b-roll, as the plan intended. Leo, the oral surgeon Dr Ghazala Ahmad-Mear, and Kate Drury, the dental therapist and facial aesthetics practitioner, each have a film of their own. There are short films on finance and Denplan and on nervous patients, and three patients tell their own stories.

The interviews were shot in 4K and edited with lighter proxy files, then finished with lower thirds, chapter cards and an animated logo, and royalty-free music chosen for each film.

The films were made for the practice’s own pages, where people are deciding on a dentist, rather than for YouTube views, and that’s where they still are, six years later:

Checked on the live site, 11 October 2026.

That’s where they matter: someone choosing a dentist in Chesterfield can see the people they’d be seeing before they ring.

We still look after the site and keep adding to it. A referral form for other dentists (2024) runs on a secure form service rather than plain email, with a login for the practice to see referrals. A blog followed in 2024, an implants page introducing Dr Adam Larke in 2025, and in 2026 our review portal, with the latest five-star Google reviews on every page, a cookie banner and online booking.