Student Testimonials

For DPG’s student testimonial film, we wanted to do more than sit people down and ask them questions. Across one packed shoot day, we transformed a Manchester apartment into our interview base before heading out across the city to capture our contributors learning on the go. From cafés to restaurants, each location helped bring DPG’s flexible ‘anytime, anywhere’ approach to life, while honest interviews gave real learners the chance to share how DPG has supported their careers.

Real People, Real Experiences

When you’re asking people to invest time and money into developing their careers, hearing from someone who’s already done it can be far more convincing than a traditional sales pitch.

So, for DPG’s learner testimonial film, we put the people who’d actually experienced their courses front and centre.

Our aim was to capture genuine conversations about why they’d chosen DPG, how they’d fitted studying around their lives and the impact their qualifications had made on their careers. But we also wanted the visuals surrounding those interviews to tell their own story.

DPG’s learning is designed to be flexible. You don’t have to be sitting in a classroom at a particular time or place. So rather than simply telling audiences that, we set out to show it.

One Apartment, One Day, Lots of Stories

We hired an apartment in Manchester and transformed it into our base for the day, giving us a relaxed, comfortable environment in which to film all of our interviews.

Creating the right atmosphere was important. These weren’t actors delivering scripted lines; they were real DPG learners talking about their own experiences, so we wanted the conversations to feel natural rather than overly staged.

We worked through all of the interviews across one shoot day, encouraging each contributor to speak openly about their experience of learning with DPG, what they’d gained from it and how it had helped them professionally.

The apartment also gave us the opportunity to capture additional lifestyle footage in a natural home environment, visually reinforcing one of the biggest ideas we wanted the film to communicate: learning doesn’t have to mean going back to the classroom.

Taking Learning Out Into Manchester

Once we’d captured our interviews, it was time to get out and about. Cue a bit of café hopping around Manchester.

We took our contributors into different locations across the city, capturing them studying on laptops in cafés and restaurants, everyday environments that gave the film much more visual variety, and helped audiences understand that learning with DPG can fit around their world. You can study from home, grab your laptop in a café, fit some learning into your day while you’re out and about or pick things back up when you’ve got the time. It’s learning that travels with you.

Showing Rather Than Telling

That became the key creative idea running through the production.

The interviews tell us about the experience, while the accompanying footage demonstrates what that flexibility actually looks like.

Instead of repeatedly saying “anytime, anywhere”, we could show someone comfortably working from the apartment before cutting to another learner studying over a coffee somewhere in Manchester.

Those familiar, everyday environments help the whole prospect of professional development feel more accessible. There are no lecture halls, intimidating classrooms or rigid schedules in sight. Just people fitting learning around the lives they’re already living.

Keeping Testimonials Human

We also wanted to avoid one of the biggest traps with testimonial videos: making real people sound like they’re reading an advert.

Our job on the day was to create an environment where everyone felt comfortable enough to forget about the production happening around them and simply talk.

That gave us honest conversations about career development, studying alongside other commitments and the experience of learning with DPG.

In the edit, we could then bring those different perspectives together into one coherent story, using the location footage to keep the film moving and visually reinforce the points being made that professional development doesn’t necessarily have to mean putting the rest of your life on hold.