Cheshire-based production company Restless Films has teamed up with Special Olympics Europe Eurasia to help increase coverage and awareness across the continent of athletes with intellectual disabilities.
Restless Films provided interviews and competition footage to 55 nations across Europe and Eurasia at the recent Special Olympics World Games in Berlin.
The event, which took place in late June, featured 6,500 athletes, with more than 2,000 from Europe, and saw coverage used from Iceland to Tajikistan.
Restless Films, run by former BBC North staff Stuart Pollitt and Phill Smith, provided a 12-strong team of reporters, camera operators and editors to deliver more than 800 interviews and edited competition highlights. This equates to more than 24 total hours of tailored ready-to-broadcast footage.
It was the first time Special Olympics Europe Eurasia had partnered to directly distribute rights-free news material to broadcasters from a World Games.
The partnership was enhanced by assistance from the European Broadcasting Union, who had a team of editors and reporters in Berlin and helped to distribute the footage to their partners across Europe.
In addition, SNTV were provided with a daily highlights offering from Restless which was made available on their platforms.
Restless Films provided a team on the ground to film the sporting action, conduct interviews with athletes and coaches and then distribute it to media in the competing countries.
They also used a dedicated social media reporter creating content for Instagram and TikTok and resulting in hundreds of thousands of views across Special Olympics Europe Eurasia’s channels.
Co-founder Pollitt said: “We are so proud of our amazing team who delivered some great moments across Europe and Eurasia. To be able to tell the stories of these amazing athletes and bring their achievements to a wider audience in their home countries is a great honour. It was particularly rewarding to be able to deliver footage to places like Ukraine where the stories of their athletes will mean so much during a challenging time for their nation.”
Smith added: “It was our biggest technical production to date. We had to rapidly deliver several hundred broadcast-ready items to 55 countries. Content was filmed and edited from 10 sites across Berlin. This huge source of media was updated hourly and made available to hundreds of broadcasters. This made it easy for media to use the material and helped to expand interest in, and knowledge of, Special Olympics.”
David Evangelista, president and managing director of Special Olympics Europe Eurasia said: “Thanks to our partnership with Restless, along with the significant efforts alongside EBU and SNTV, we successfully expanded media coverage across Europe and Eurasia. We are eager to further enhance this platform for change at upcoming local, regional and international Special Olympics events.”
Restless Films also makes short form content, offers sports production and training to clients in the UK and around the world.
Special Olympics Europe Eurasia, a regional office of Special Olympics, Inc. (SOI), encompasses a diverse range of cultures, languages, and customs traversing 58 countries in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. There are close to 350,000 athletes with intellectual disabilities in SOEE. From Iceland to Israel, and Portugal to Kazakhstan, Special Olympics promotes respect, inclusion, and human dignity for people with intellectual disabilities through sports.
