Before I worked in marketing I taught English for two years. I have stood in a lot of corridors on open days, and I have watched a lot of schools film the wrong thing. The building is almost never the reason a family chooses you.
What most schools film
The footage is predictable because the brief is predictable. A wide shot of the facade. The library. The science lab with nobody in it. A drone pass over the sports field. The head teacher at a desk, speaking in complete sentences about values and excellence.
It is competent and it is completely interchangeable. Show that film to a parent with the logo removed and they could not tell you which school it was, or which country it was in.
What parents are actually deciding
A family choosing a school is not comparing facilities. Every school in the bracket has a library and a lab. They are trying to answer a question nobody says out loud: will my child be alright here.
That question is answered by atmosphere, and atmosphere lives in things you cannot photograph on a tour. How loud is the corridor between lessons. Do the older students acknowledge the younger ones. When a child is standing alone, how long before somebody notices.
A parent walking through your building picks all of that up in about four minutes without being able to explain how. Video is the only medium that carries it, and it is the one thing a brochure genuinely cannot do.
The shots that matter
Film a teacher with a nervous child. Not staged. The moment where a member of staff crouches to a smaller person's eye level and the child's shoulders drop. That single shot does more than a five-minute film about pastoral care.
Film the corridor at change of lesson. Noise, movement, people who clearly know each other. Silence reads as discipline to a headmaster and as coldness to a parent.
Film students explaining their own work. Not a prepared testimonial about how much they love the school. A fourteen-year-old talking about a project they are genuinely interested in, in their own words, with the enthusiasm and the stumbles left in.
Film the ordinary transitions. Lining up, packing away, moving between rooms. These are the moments where a school's culture is most visible, because nobody has arranged them.
Film staff talking to each other. Parents read the relationship between adults as a signal about what the place is like to be in all day.
What to leave out
Cut the drone shot. Every school has one, they all look the same, and no parent has ever chosen a school because of an aerial view of the roof.
Cut the empty room. A classroom without children is a photograph of furniture.
Be careful with the head teacher's speech. If it must exist, film it as an answer to a real question rather than a statement to camera. The difference is audible immediately.
The practical part
Open days are chaotic and you get one attempt. Agree the shot list a week ahead so nobody is improvising on the day. Brief the staff that they will be filmed during normal activity, not asked to perform, because the fear of being filmed is what makes people stiff.
Get written consent for the children you intend to show, in advance, and keep a clear list of who has and has not been cleared. In Switzerland this is not optional and it is much harder to sort out afterwards.
One good open day produces enough material for a term. The mistake is treating it as one film rather than as a shoot that feeds a year of shorter pieces.
The honest version
If the atmosphere in your school is not good, do not film it, because video will show that just as clearly. This only works for schools that are genuinely warm places and have simply never managed to prove it to somebody looking at a website at eleven at night.
Most schools are that. Very few of them film it.