The interview we never used
She'd signed the consent form. She meant it when she signed it. She turned up on shoot day, sat down in front of the camera, and started sharing her story to help other people going through the same thing.
And within a few minutes it was clear she wasn't ready.
She wasn't crying. She wasn't asking to stop. What she was saying didn't match how she was saying it. She was telling us she'd made peace with her diagnosis, and everything about the way she said it told us she hadn't. There was still shame in it. She was worried about what people would think. What it might mean at work.
My client had picked it up too. We talked about it after. She agreed. And to her huge credit, that footage never went anywhere.
I've been thinking about that shoot a lot lately, especially as I've leaned deeper into healthcare storytelling. Because on paper, everything was above board. Consent form signed. Story approved. Participant briefed. If you were auditing the process, you'd tick every box and move on.
But the form isn't the consent. It’s where the conversation starts.
What I do in the room
I want to be honest about this, because there's a version of this post where I position myself as the ethical hero of the story, and I'm not that. I was hired to do a job. It's not my call to shut a shoot down because I've got a hunch. That's not my role, and I don't think it should be.
What I do do, every time, is give people the out. Before we start rolling I tell them we can stop any time. Take a breather. Ask for a question again. Whatever they need.
And after we wrap I thank them properly, and I mean it. Being told someone's most vulnerable story is a privilege, and I don't want to ever get casual about that.
But the decision to use footage, or shelf it, sits with my client. Which is where I actually want to say something.
What good looks like on the client side
If you're commissioning patient or participant stories, here's what I think a good consent process looks like from where I sit.
Treat consent as a moment, not just a form. People can give informed, willing consent and still not be ready when the camera's on. A form can't tell you that. A conversation can. So can the person you've paid to sit in the room with them.
Play the finished piece back to the participant before you release it. The healthcare teams I work with do this as a matter of course, and it makes an enormous difference. The point isn't that they're approving your edit. The point is they're never blindsided by it.
Assume consent has an expiry date. A peer said something to me recently that I'm still sitting with. She never gets lifetime consent from people. I'd honestly never thought about it much before. It's the norm in a lot of production to sign a blanket 'use in perpetuity' release, and that norm doesn't really hold up when you think about how much people and lives change. Someone consenting to share their story at 32 might feel very differently at 52. Worth building into your process.
Be willing to shelve footage. Yes, even after you've paid for it. If someone's changed their mind, or you clock in the edit that a story isn't landing the way it should, don't push it. Short-term loss, long-term trust.
One GUIDE worth an hour of your time
I've been reading the Dignified Storytelling Handbook. It's a free PDF that came out of the international disability sector, and it's the best thing I've read on the ethics of telling other people's stories. Not just consent. Bias in how you shoot, how you edit, the stereotypes you might accidentally reinforce.
I'm sending it to the healthcare clients I work with, personally. If you commission stories from real people, whether that's patients, donors, staff or families, it's worth the read.
I don't have all the answers on this stuff. I'm working it out as I go, same as everyone else. But I know that noticing the moment she wasn't ready, and having a client who acted on that, is one of the things I'm proudest of on any shoot I've done.
The consent form was signed. The story was safely told. Nobody saw it. That's how it should be.
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