How to Build a Brand Story With Video

Lessons from the Walnut Forest Academy Campaign

Walnut Forest Academy founder Dr. Traci Scheepstra watches a class taking learning outdoors as they wade through a creek during science class.

Every brand has a story. Most of them just don't know how to tell it yet.

That was true for Walnut Forest Academy, a nature-based private school tucked into the forests and farmland of scenic Eden Mills, Ontario. Established in 2023 by Dr. Traci Scheepstra, Ph.D., an award-winning educator with many years of experience in teaching and learning, knew their approach to education was different. They knew families who visited the school to experience this unique educational experience almost always ended up enrolling their children. What they didn't have was a way to showcase that feeling of wonder, and sense of belonging into something they could share with the families who haven't visited yet.

That's the gap video fills. And it's the reason we don't start any project with a camera. We start by listening.

Strategy Starts with Listening First

Before a single shot list gets built, we sit down with our clients and let them talk. Not about deliverables but about their brand and their business philosophy, in their own words.

With Walnut Forest Academy, that meant having conversations with its founder Dr. Traci Scheepstra and hearing about her nearly 40 years of educational philosophy distilled into a single, simple idea: "We teach to the mind, we teach to the body, we teach to the heart, and we teach to the spirit."

She talked about how her background and lived experiences crystalized the philosophy behind Walnut Forest Academy: that children thrive through their own path of discovery..

We also listened to the parents, by creating a safe and comfortable space for them to express what the school means to them and their children in their own words, such as "This school feels like a safe haven for childhood" and "It's literally a breath of fresh air", language we never could have written for them, because it wasn't our experience to write. It was theirs.

This is the part of the process that's easy to rush past but is impossible to skip. A brand story that doesn't start with real listening ends up sounding like marketing. A brand story built on what people actually have to say ends up sounding more real and authentic because it is.

We Find Out What They Actually Need

Listening tells you the story. But it doesn't yet tell you what to actually build.

To achieve the various goals Walnut Forest Academy had requested, they didn't need one video, they needed a system of videos, each doing a different job for a different moment in a parent's decision-making journey:

A 60-second brand film, built for both landscape and vertical formats, designed to be the first emotional touchpoint — the thing that stops a scrolling parent and makes them curious.
A founder's story, giving prospective families a face, a philosophy, and a reason to trust the person behind the school.
A parent testimonial video, weaving together four different families' experiences to answer the question every prospective parent is quietly asking: will this actually work for my kid?

Figuring out that a school needs three distinct pieces of content, not one longer video, is a strategic decision, not a creative one. It comes from understanding the actual buyer's journey from curiosity, to credibility, and proof. Each video needed to be built to meet a parent at a different stage of that journey.

We Bring the Right Creative to the Story

Once we know the story and what it needs to do, we chose creative that actually serves it rather than defaulting to whatever looks good in a reel.

For Walnut Forest Academy, that meant resisting the urge to make a "polished school ad" and instead leaning fully into the sensory, unscripted texture of the place itself: sunlight through the trees, muddy water shoes, a child crouched over a caterpillar, a teacher kneeling down to a child's eye level instead of standing over them. The brand film's structure mirrors the school's own philosophy — moving from wonder, to a question, to a discovery, to a spark of curiosity, before landing on the four pillars of mind, body, heart, and spirit. The visuals were never chosen because they were pretty. They were chosen because they were proof of the philosophy in action.

For the founder's story, the creative choice was restraint: let Dr. Traci talk, let the pauses breathe, and cut to nothing more than the everyday moments of school life — circle time, the creek, the chicken coop — that back up what she's saying without over-illustrating it.

For the testimonial film, the creative decision was to resist the temptation to over-produce four separate interviews into four separate stories, and instead braid them into one shared narrative of confidence, belonging, and growth so that the viewer hears one consistent truth from four different families instead of four disconnected anecdotes.

Strategy Brings The Brand to Life

The final step is making sure the story doesn't just get made, but that it gets used.

For Walnut Forest Academy, that meant planning delivery formats from day one: 16x9 versions for the website and longer-form platforms, plus 9x16 cuts for Instagram and social. Every video would end on the same simple call to action: Book a Tour. Because the goal was never to “just have a nice brand video." It was to move real parents, at a real decision point, one step closer to walking through the door.

We listen. Understand the need. And then choose the creative that serves the truth, not the trend. We strategize the rollout so the story actually reaches the people it's for.

That's brand storytelling through video.

Interested in what this process could look like for your brand? Let's talk about your story — reach out to Iceberg Media Productions.

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