A Year From Now, Someone Will Quote Your Film Back To You, Word For Word.
We're a small documentary studio that does one thing: we sit founders down in a quiet room and pull the real story out — the 2am doubt, the first cheque, the thing that still keeps you up.
Then we cut it into three or four minutes of film that smells like the place it was shot in, and lives at the top of your homepage long after the launch buzz fades.
One camera, held close — the way you'd sit across from an old friend.
A borrowed room, a recorder, one good question.
Narrafilm began above a print shop on the 600 block, in a room that smelled of toner and old wood. We'd been hired to make a “quick brand video” for a coffee roaster — the kind that's all swooping drone shots and a voiceover nobody remembers. Halfway through, we put the camera down and just asked her why she started. She talked for forty minutes. By the end the intern was crying.
That forty minutes became the whole film. The drone footage never made the cut.
So we stopped making adverts and started making documentaries. The work hasn't changed much since: a quiet room, soft light through a window, two cameras, and questions designed to get someone to stop performing and start telling the truth. We grade everything warm and filmic, leave the grain in, and keep the hum of the real place underneath — the espresso machine, the traffic, the breath between sentences.
We're still here in Saint Petersburg, a short walk from where it started. Small on purpose. The person who hears your story on the first call is the same person framing the shot, and the same person in the edit suite at 11pm finding the cut where it finally lands.
Four things we won't bend on.
Documentary, not advertisement.
No teleprompter, no “and here's what makes us different” line read off a card. We ask, you talk, and we build the film from the moments that arrive on their own. It's slower, and it's the only thing that holds up on a second watch.
The texture is the point.
Hands on a workbench, steam off a cup, the chipped paint on a door you've opened ten thousand times. We shoot the small physical truths of your place because that's what makes a viewer feel they were there with you.
Two rounds of notes, one number.
The price you're quoted is the price you pay. Two full rounds of revisions are written into every project — when your feedback lands in the inbox, no new line item lands with it.
Cut by the people who shot it.
The edit isn't handed down a chain to a stranger. The same two ears that heard you tell the story are the ones choosing where it breathes and where it cuts. Nothing gets lost in translation.
Two people, the same two ears, start to last cut.
There's no account manager to hand you off to. When you book a film, you meet the people who'll actually make it — over coffee, with a recorder running, an hour set aside to find the turn in your story worth the whole film.
We've sat across from roasters, founders raising a Series A, a third-generation boat builder, and a furniture maker who hadn't told her own story out loud in years. Different rooms, same job: make it quiet enough for the truth to surface, and patient enough to catch it.
- Filmed and edited where we're based — Saint Petersburg, no fly-in crew you'll never see again.
- A first cut in your inbox within ten working days of the shoot.
- Delivered in every shape you need — homepage master, deck cut, vertical for the feed.
The room only goes quiet once you start talking.
Send a few lines about who you are and where the film will live, or call during studio hours and we'll walk the options out loud.