Documentary Storytelling for a Company Trying to Solve the Canadian Housing Crisis

The Project

IGV Housing is reimagining how homes are built in Canada. Through proprietary offsite construction methods, they're producing homes that are more efficient to build, better suited to the Canadian climate, and worth living in. Their ambition is large: to help solve the housing affordability crisis and open the market to a generation of Canadians who have been priced out of it.

That kind of mission requires more than a marketing campaign. It requires buy-in: from federal, provincial, and municipal policymakers; from developers; from the communities where IGV will operate; and from the people who might one day live in one of their homes.

IGV recognized that the conventional construction industry playbook wasn't going to cut it. They needed something more human, more story-driven. That's why they chose to work with Olam Films.

The Challenge

IGV needed to communicate across a wide range of audiences, each with different concerns and different levels of familiarity with what IGV is doing. Policymakers needed to understand the systemic case for offsite construction. Developers needed to understand the technical model and the business opportunity. Communities needed to feel reassured and excited. Future homeowners needed to feel something.

And underneath all of that: IGV also needed to convey something harder to pin down: the conviction of the people behind the company, and what they actually believe about housing and why they've bet on this approach.

None of that fits in a single film. It needed a body of content, each piece shaped for a specific audience, all of it rooted in the same story.

The Approach

Olam Films brought a documentary filmmaker's instinct to the brief: before thinking about formats or scripts, we focused on understanding what IGV was actually trying to say and to whom.

Through careful interview development and on-camera direction, we helped IGV's team articulate their vision in ways that were clear and honest rather than polished and vague. We worked out what each audience needed to hear and shaped each video around that, without letting the individual pieces lose sight of the larger story.

The result is an ongoing series of films that collectively build IGV's story across audiences and contexts: from overview pieces that explain who IGV is and why they exist, to more targeted content for specific audiences, to deeper dives into the technology and the people behind it.

The Result

IGV has changed considerably since we started working together, with new programs, new markets, and a sharpening sense of what the company is building toward. The films have evolved with them.

They've kept coming back, and we've kept going deeper. At this point, Olam Films isn't a vendor IGV calls when they need a video. We're the team that helps them figure out what they're trying to say and how to say it. That's the kind of working relationship where the best work gets made.

The Films

IGV

What this project demonstrates

• ·

  Narrative strategy for complex organizations: identifying what a company needs to say, to whom, and in what form

• ·

  Content for multiple audiences: videos built for policymakers, developers, communities, and consumers, all without losing the thread

• ·

  Documentary filmmaking in a corporate context: interview-driven, human-centred work that makes technical and organizational ideas land

• ·

  Long-term partnership: growing with a client over time, not just delivering a project and moving on

• ·

  Working best when we believe in it: mission-driven clients bring out our best work