I was asked to produce a video recently for an application story, where all we had to work with were four rather similar application photos and a picture of the product involved. There was no argument that it was a good story, but what do you do when the resources are so limited?

Well, start by looking at what the story is about, and where it is. In this case, it was associated with melting ice shelves in the Antarctic. Immediately, that suggested the possibility of stock photos and videos of Antarctica, free NASA imagery of ice shelves, stock video of environmental changes and DIY graphics of locations in the Antarctic circle.

Check out the final video for yourselves here. You’ll spot the source application pics by the words “courtesy of British Antarctic Survey”, and the product pic (artistically positioned in a blizzard) at the end. Everything else has creatively sourced or created from scratch.