The Motion Factory worked together with Bestuursadvisering to create an informational DVD about the WMO for a city in the Netherlands. WMO (Wet Maatschappelijke Ondersteuning) is a Dutch law. The DVD was sent to every household in the city. The DVD is in Dutch.

The aim of the DVD that we produced was to inform the public about this law. The WMO is a very broad law, so it's not easy to explain in one or two sentences what this law is about. Explaining it properly would make a long and boring DVD.

The concept

We didn't want to present a list of aspects of this law and give a theoretical explanation of the philosophy behind this law, so we chose a different approach. We turned Wmo into a person, a character. We created a cartoon face for him and on the video, he speaks to you directly. Instead of explaining the law, our character takes you into the city and shows how the WMO has changed the lives of ordinary people.

Wmo, the personification of the law.

Planning

The city provided us with a list of subjects that we could film for each application area of the law. We made a selection from this list based on what would come across well on screen. Also, we wanted to have plenty of variety to show that the law is very broad. So we wanted to have items related to older people, but also items related to children. We wanted to show people from all walks of life.

Then we studied each item from the list in more detail and created an outline of the video, including the text for the voice over. Based on that we made a shooting schedule and started filming.

Shooting and editing

Everything was prepared. The shooting schedule was there, appointments had been made with all the people we needed to film and locations were arranged. And then something unexpected happened: it started snowing heavily. This caused all kinds of problems for the shoot, so we decided to postpone the shoot.
However, there was an unusually long period of snow and we couldn't postpone any longer. So in the end we recorded the whole DVD while the town was covered in snow.

During filming, everything was covered in snow.

We even recorded an extra item about clearing ice and snow from roads and sidewalks, but since the video was already getting longer than planned, we decided to drop this item.

After editing, we refined the voice over script and used a voice actor to provide the voice for our Wmo character.

The result

The DVD was well received and has been distributed to every household in the town. Here's a short clip from the DVD:

You can watch the complete WMO video on Youtube. It's split in two parts: part 1 and part 2.