Case Study · Brand Film

Building the Foundation

A brand film for Forest Lake Academy, built around two alumni narrators and the current students living out their same story — now the first thing every visitor to the school's website sees.

▶ Watch the finished film · 1:50

Client

Forest Lake Academy

Deliverable

Website hero film

Narrators

Brad '99 & Yadelin '23

Runtime

1 min 50 sec

Structure

4-sequence narrative

Status

Live — homepage hero

The Brief

Forest Lake Academy has been building students' foundations for over a century — a Seventh-day Adventist college-prep school whose real proof is scattered across a hundred years of graduates, in hospitals, courtrooms and boardrooms nobody visiting the website will ever see.

The website could recite the numbers. It couldn't make a scrolling parent feel that the school forming their child today is the same one that formed a doctor or a CEO. The film needed to close that distance — to make a decades-old outcome feel like it's happening in the classroom right now.

The Idea

The film cast Brad (Class of '99, UCF Business, now CEO of AdventHealth Apopka) and Yadelin (Class of '23, UF Pre-Med) as narrators of a single, timeless foundation-building process — then never let them appear in flashback. Every frame under their voices is a current FLA student, in the middle of the exact struggle Brad and Yadelin describe from memory.

"Brad and Yadelin are the narrators of a timeless, foundation-building process proving success in a world beyond FLA. Current FLA students are the visual evidence that this process is still at work today."

The Structure

Rather than a testimonial intercut with b-roll, the film runs as a single build — hook, conflict, buildup, resolution — with Brad and Yadelin's voices doing the work of connecting a volleyball court and a physics classroom to a life decades on.

1. 01
   The Hook. Opens cold on the volleyball team, huddled together before a match — team-building as the very first image. Hard-cuts to Brad's world, his pen writing a personal note of appreciation, then to a current student at the whiteboard, wrestling a physics equation. "How do you lead when the playbook runs out?"
2. 02
   The Conflict. A student-athlete overwhelmed mid-practice, a musician fighting a difficult bar of music, a student-council leader building consensus — living avatars of Brad and Yadelin's own memories. "Sometimes the biggest decision comes down to one thing... your foundation."
3. 03
   The Buildup. Light through the campus, a quiet moment on a bench, a teacher mentoring a student — dialogue withheld, replaced by the narrators' memory of a conversation just like it. "...that your success is not defined by what you achieve alone, but by how you serve and lead the people around you."
4. 04
   The Resolution. A doctor reassuring a patient, a CEO in with his team — then back to campus, closing on the same volleyball team from the opening frame, now mid-match and winning the point, seconds before the branded end card.

"But the foundation you're standing on — that has to be constant."

The Craft

• The shared sentence. Brad and Yadelin never simply take turns — in the film's final beat, they finish each other's sentence in real time. Two people separated by 24 years complete one thought, in one voice.
• No flashbacks, ever. Every visual under the narrators' memories belongs to a current student. The film never cuts to "young Brad" or "young Yadelin." That restraint is what makes the closing claim land as observed fact, not sentiment.
• A closed loop. The film opens on the volleyball team huddled together and closes on that same team winning the point, seconds before the end card. Everything Brad and Yadelin say happens in the space between those two shots — team building becomes team success.

The Result

The film runs as the autoplay hero on the Forest Lake Academy homepage — the first thing a prospective family sees before a single word of copy loads. The site's own headline, "Build Your Foundation at Forest Lake Academy," takes its language directly from the film's closing thesis.

Watch it live at forestlakeacademy.org, or the full film on Vimeo.

Written, shot and edited by j michael media for Forest Lake Academy. Now running as the school website's homepage hero film.