Case study · PRASAD
Four years later we were teaching volunteers in Ganeshpuri, India, and filming a three week tour of the Philippines and Taiwan. None of that was the plan. Each job we did turned into the next one.
3 Gold MUSE
Video and Nonprofit, in 2022, 2023 and 2025
4 years
From one local film to work overseas
Ganeshpuri
Where the workshop behind the book was taught
Phylicia Rashad
PRASAD's spokesperson presents the 2025 film
The client
PRASAD works in India, Mexico and the United States, with licensees in Australia and Europe. In India, where it operates as PRASAD Chikitsa, it runs healthcare, community development, and water and sanitation programs. PRASAD de México provides free eye surgery. In the United States it runs one program: children's dental care for low income families in Sullivan County, New York. That is where we came in.
2022 · The first film
PRASAD hired us to make a film for the dental program's 30th anniversary. They wanted to show what 30 years of it had done for kids in Sullivan County, and why it still needed the community behind it. The film played at their gala.
It was a program film, not an event recap. Those are two different jobs. One documents an evening. The other has to carry a mission and make an ask land in a room full of people who could just as easily do nothing.
Gold, MUSE Creative Awards 2022, Video and Nonprofit. See the winner listing.
2023 · The second film
The second program film for their gala, and the second Gold in two years. Two in a row is the point where a client stops thinking of you as the company they hired and starts thinking of you as the reason the room reacted the way it did.
Gold, MUSE Creative Awards 2023, Video and Nonprofit.
May 2024 · San Francisco
PRASAD had a private fundraiser in San Francisco and a set of interviews they wanted on camera with people close to how the organization grew. There are plenty of good production companies in San Francisco. Hiring one of them would have been cheaper and a lot less trouble.
They flew us out instead. What they needed was not a camera. It was somebody who knew what to ask. A crew that has never sat down with the people you serve will hand you clean footage and answers that go nowhere. The questions are the job.
No single film came out of that trip. We shot the interviews to be used later, for whatever PRASAD needed next. We had not put a name on it yet, but that is Story Stacking. Shoot with a plan, cut it when the moment calls for it.
March 2025 · Ganeshpuri, India
Once we had shown we could travel and come back with something worth having, PRASAD asked us to come to India. We were in Ganeshpuri for a week in March 2025, filming the work of PRASAD Chikitsa.
What became obvious out there is that we were the wrong long term answer. Their staff and volunteers are on site every day, in rooms we are never going to be in, watching things no visiting crew can schedule. They had phones. What they did not have was any way to decide what was worth capturing before they hit record.
So we offered to teach them. I put together a workshop for people with no production training and nothing but the phone in their pocket. Not how to work a camera. How to think before you press the button.
It worked. And it is the reason the book exists.
Filming PRASAD Chikitsa's agriculture programs, Ganeshpuri, India
What the workshop became
The framework had always had a crew behind it, a budget, and weeks to develop the story. Ganeshpuri was the test of whether it held up with none of that. Teaching it to volunteers forced every piece of it to be explainable, and anything I could not explain plainly turned out not to be holding much up.
That version is what became Stories That Move Mountains, our guide to nonprofit fundraising video. It is also something a nonprofit can now book as a workshop for its own team.
July 2025 · The Philippines and Taiwan
India settled the question of whether we could work anywhere. A few months later, Children's Orchestra Society was taking its students on a three week tour of the Philippines and Taiwan with nothing in the budget to document it.
Instead of turning it down, we pitched a documentary and helped them run a fundraiser around it. The campaign covered the travel. The film paid for itself, and the orchestra ended up with a real record of a tour that would otherwise only exist in parents' phone footage.
We were there for three weeks in July 2025. That project belongs to Children's Orchestra Society, but it happened because of PRASAD.
2025 · The third Gold
A film about PRASAD's work across India, Mexico and the United States, presented by Phylicia Rashad, who is the organization's spokesperson. Nuby DeLeon shot and cut it, with Jeffrey Castro and Scott Muniz on camera. PRASAD runs it on their homepage.
Gold, MUSE Creative Awards 2025, Video and Nonprofit. See the winner listing.
The sequence
When
What happened
What it led to
2022
Dental program film, Sullivan County. Gold MUSE.
A second film
2023
The Power of a Smile. Gold MUSE.
Trust past the local work
May 2024
San Francisco. Fundraiser interviews.
Proof we could travel
March 2025
Ganeshpuri, India. Filming, then a workshop for staff and volunteers.
The book
July 2025
Philippines and Taiwan. A documentary that paid for itself.
A tour on the record
2025
The Global Impact of PRASAD, presented by Phylicia Rashad. Gold MUSE.
A third Gold
What it proves
We never pitched international work. We made a film about a dental program forty minutes from the office and did it well enough that they offered us the next thing. Then the one after that. The travel, the workshop, the book and the Asia tour all came out of a client deciding we were worth another step.
PRASAD did not keep hiring us because we owned better cameras. They kept hiring us because of what happens before the cameras come out.
Tell us what the film has to do and where it has to happen. We will tell you straight whether we are the right people for it.
Most of these begin as a fifteen-minute call.
Last updated September 2026 · Nimble Dragon Studios · Monticello, New York