A Royal Visit is the Cathedral’s official film documenting the day His Majesty King Charles III visited Lichfield Cathedral – a project I produced from start to finish, including the main film and a series of follow-up interviews. Together, these pieces became some of the Cathedral’s strongest-performing video content of the quarter, with the main film achieving nearly 80% higher engagement than our typical video benchmarks and the interviews outperforming average video engagement by 12–20%.

Due to media restrictions, I could only film outside alongside a large group of press and media, so my approach focused on building a sense of occasion through careful composition and observational detail. I began with static tripod shots to establish the mood as the crowds gathered, then moved to handheld tracking shots stabilised with a compact tripod rather than a gimbal to remain steady and unobtrusive within the tightly packed media area.

The film is edited to Zadok the Priest, a piece recommended by the Dean of Lichfield. Its choral scale helped shape the emotional tone of the final cut. Because interior recording was limited to certain personnel, I worked with iPhone footage captured by my manager and blended it with my own material to create a seamless narrative transition from the Cathedral grounds into the interior itself.

Following the visit, I filmed a series of interviews inside the Cathedral with clergy, staff and community partners. I opened each interview with a short outtake to introduce a sense of warmth and authenticity, aligning with the human-centred tone of the wider project.

When analysing performance, I benchmarked engagement against the Cathedral’s video-only dataset for the quarter. Announcement graphics about the visit generated predictably anomalous spikes and would have skewed results, so isolating video content provided a far more accurate comparison, confirming the strong performance of both the film and interviews.

Together, the film and interview series form an atmospheric, human-centred portrait of the day, celebrating the joy, craftsmanship and community spirit that defined the visit, and resonating strongly with audiences across social media.