32 ECOMMERCE EBRD
BANKING ON VIDEO How do you make a bank exciting? This one uses a crack video team to record its positive impacts in the world Words by Neal Romanek
he European Bank for Reconstruction and Development was set up in 1991 after the collapse of Communism in an
Its work includes everything from advice to small businesses and female entrepreneurs, to renewable energy and natural gas development, to big infrastructure projects like dams and railways. The EBRD helped in Ukraine’s recovery after the Chernobyl disaster and managed funds for creating a colossal containment structure over Chernobyl’s Reactor 4 in 2016. VR IN THE DESERT The EBRD’s work is about transformation, and transformation is the theme of all storytelling. Jonathan Wells, the bank’s Head of Multimedia Production, is reponsible for getting that story out to the world.
After ten years as a producer-director at the BBC, Wells joined the EBRD in 2017. “In the past year, I’ve gotten to travel to these places, making films, making content about what we’re doing.” And the EBRD is doing a lot – including using VR to great eect. Many traditionalists are still tutting at VR, disregarding it simply because HBO is not releasing 12-part dramas using this technology. But high-end VR content is growing by leaps and bounds in some sectors – and it’s becoming a pillar of the EBRD’s communications strategy. Wells took a 360 video crew to Jordan’s Al Rajef Wind Farm to collect some footage showing o the scale and beauty of the
eort to bring capitalist opportunities to countries in the former Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc. The EBRD’s mission has more or less stayed the same – it aims to support free markets in developing economies – but its reach has expanded beyond eastern Europe to now include central Asia and the southern and eastern Mediterranean. The bank’s most recent work has taken it to the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Morocco and it’s currently funding projects in more than 30 countries.
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