Faces of CITC — Class of 2023

The Construction Industry Training Council of Washington had been growing for years — new campuses, expanded programs, staff and facilities spread across the state — and almost no video content to show for it. Their graduation ceremony was the biggest moment on the calendar: a live audience of students and families, and a window to inspire the class, move the people in those seats, and convert some of them into the next cohort. By 2023, after six years of partnership, the ask had evolved from "make us a graduation film" to "capture who we've become."

Production on each film took about a month — not in shooting days, but in coordination. Five campuses spread across Washington state meant scheduling interviews with staff, students, and faculty at each location, making runs to active job sites to catch students doing real trades work, and flying drone across interior warehouse labs and open exterior campuses. Every site got five to ten hours of coverage. In years when graduation ceremonies ran on both sides of the Cascades, Image Tale was at both. The through-line across all six films was the MUSE storytelling methodology — a discovery framework built around three questions: who are the People, what are the Places, and what's the Plot? Before a single frame was shot, Image Tale sat with CITC leadership to surface their Desire, Uniqueness, and Motivations. Those conversations produced a keyword set that drove everything downstream — the questions asked in every interview, the way shots were framed, the choices made in the edit. By 2023, the system had been refined across six years of iteration.

The films played to full houses at graduation ceremonies across Washington — the audience they were built for. From there they moved to CITC's YouTube channel, website, and into industry press. One subject became the proof of concept. A graduating student talked on camera about struggling to make ends meet before CITC, and buying a house by the time she walked across the stage. The footage of her playing with her son at a park, cut against her own words, landed harder than anything else in the series. She appeared on the cover of a construction industry magazine, across CITC's advertising materials, and was eventually hired as an instructor at one of their facilities — and later became its director. Six contracts over six years, each at a higher rate than the last, was the clearest signal the work was doing what it was supposed to do.

Behind every CITC graduation film was a story waiting to be told at a different scale. The skilled trades face a real crisis: senior workers retiring faster than new ones are trained, a backlog of work with nowhere to go, and an entire generation that hasn't considered the trades as a path. Every campus visit surfaced that tension — in the faces of instructors who'd spent thirty years in the field, in students who'd come from nothing and were walking into careers that desperately needed them. The graduation film format captured the transformation. It never quite got to the weight of what was underneath it. That's the film that still hasn't been made.