Town of Golden Beach 95th Anniversary Film

Town of Golden Beach

The Town of Golden Beach turned 95 in 2024. Rather than build the film around the milestone, we built it around the people, town staff and residents interviewed in the places where they actually work and live. One of them was 103 years old and had lived in Golden Beach for most of her life. Her memory reached back most of the way to the town’s founding, and that gave the film something no archive footage could: a living connection between the Golden Beach of decades ago and the community it had become.

The full story

What started as a single public-safety video for the Town of Golden Beach became a years-long relationship documenting the town, and ended with an eight-foot aerial portrait of the place hanging in Town Hall. The anniversary film sits in the middle of that run rather than at the start of it.

A barrier island town of that size does not have a communications department or a stock of footage to draw on. Everything that exists has to be made, and it has to work for residents who will recognise every street in it. That is a different standard from a promotional film aimed at people who have never been somewhere.

Read the case study on how the town kept calling back.

Golden Beach is 961 people and 364 houses on a barrier island between the Intracoastal and the Atlantic, incorporated in May 1929. Filming a 95th anniversary for a town that size means you are not documenting an institution. You are documenting neighbours, most of whom know each other by name. The gallery below is behind the scenes from five years of work with the town: the public-safety PSA with Mayor Glenn Singer, the new civic headquarters and its ribbon cutting, and the eight-foot aerial photograph of the town that now hangs in the town manager’s office. The full story is in the Golden Beach case study.