overview

Aside from our shared passion for video production and high-quality storytelling, many of us at Artex have something else in common: we have young children. It’s a very real fear of ours that we live in a world where an active shooter might make their way into our kids’ schools.

As a video production company, we sought to talk about this issue in a broader and more personal way.

We came together to create a short film about the need for common-sense gun reform.

We were adamant that this project not be released until we had partnered with a gun control lobbyist who could help us position our short film to make a true impact.

We were fortunate to find a partner in Brady: United Against Gun Violence, a US nonprofit working diligently to advocate for gun control. For many years now, they’ve been working to control gun violence by getting the Brady Plan enacted, which will rely on funding from congress in order to conduct research on how gun violence can be considered a national health issue.

Process

Going back to our roles as parents, we were eager to show how gun violence affects our day-to-day. Instead of focusing on national news incidents, we wanted to talk directly to the parents who may not believe that shootings could happen in their neighborhoods.

We wanted to ask what the fear of gun violence would make us to do ensure our children were protected?

The film would focus around a regular morning routine between a father and his daughter. However, there’s a caveat: each morning, before she goes to school, he puts a bulletproof vest beneath her clothes.

Our goal was to bring gun violence into the normal, into the mundane. The feeling we wanted to evoke is that, as parents, we may feel complacent, but injecting a bulletproof vest into an everyday task can shake us into facing reality.
Our creative approach involved an improvisational conversation between our actors, a handheld camera, and no music. Using natural, regularly-occurring elements like the sound of laundry in the wash and the drip of brewing coffee set an anticipatory tone, giving viewers the uncomfortable sense that dread was just around the corner.

Two truly talented actors helped us juxtapose an intimate family moment against a very real nightmare that exists in our every day.

With the final scene, we hoped to put the viewer in the shoes of the father, driving the feeling that they were watching their own child go out into an unknown world, not knowing what would happen next. The resulting anxiety would hopefully inspire the viewer to act on gun violence and not sit by in complacency.

Result

Our film, New Morning Routine, was at the center of The Brady Campaign’s 2019 outreach efforts.

At the annual Brady Action Awards Gala in Washington DC in November of 2019, the New Morning Routine film was played, viewed by guests including Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton, Bryan Cranston, Mike Thompson, Lucy McBath, Ted Deutch, and more members of congress.

That same month, on the 13th of November, Congress passed $25 million in funding for research on gun violence, to be shared by the National Institute of Health and the CDC. This marks the first time in almost 25 years that the US government will research gun violence as a public health matter and will hopefully work to prevent and reduce more gun violence in the future.

The American Advertising Federation gave our film an overall Best in Show honor during its awards gala in Miami in 2020.

Artex – our Los Angeles-based video production company – was responsible for the conceptualization, scripting, treatment, production, and post-production for this project. We have enormous gratitude for the generous equipment and time donations from the crew who made this possible.