St Pats in Five Points Is for the People
- Jonathan Palance
- Aug 30, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: May 24
When the Five Points Association asked us to spend a day covering St Pats in Five Points, we said yes before they finished the sentence. You could say this festival is the guiding light for everything the FPA does the other 364 days a year — one of the largest single-day events in the Southeast, and the kind of community moment Columbia builds entire calendars around.
What the Day Actually Looks Like
We were on the ground early and did not stop until close. Twelve hours, roughly 30,000 steps, the entire footprint of Five Points covered on foot. We filmed the Get to the Green race, the parade, the food vendors, the kids' zone, the stages, the headliners, and all the in-between moments — somebody's grandma dancing on a curb in a green wig, the bagpipers warming up behind a vendor tent, the line at the corner stand that did not move for an hour because the food was that good.
A Few Stats Worth Sitting With
Before we get into the videography itself, it's worth understand what this even means:
~45,000 attendees in a typical year, with more than 30,000 on the ground in 2024 — pleasingly close to our step count.
$12M+ in economic impact for the City of Columbia and Richland County, per the festival's own numbers.
$1M+ donated to Midlands charities over the festival's run.
30+ countries represented in the crowd. About 35% of attendees travel into town for it.
42 years and counting. 2024 was the 42nd annual.
This is not a small thing. Five Points lives a completely different life on the second Saturday in March, and a meaningful chunk of small businesses in the village have their best sales day of the year on that one Saturday.
Why an Event Like This Needs a Real Video
Here's the use case for event videography that we keep coming back to: you are filming this year so you can sell next year. A festival like St Pats has to convince sponsors, vendors, performers, the city, and tens of thousands of future attendees that this thing is worth their money, their time, their permits, and their Saturday. Words and stat sheets do some of that work. A 60-second cut where you can see and feel does the rest.
For the Five Points Association we built two layers of deliverables out of the same shoot day:
One hero recap video — the piece embedded above. Front-page material. Press kit material. The thing they send when somebody asks "what is this event."
Ten shorter marketing cutdowns — vertical for Instagram and TikTok, square for Facebook, horizontal for the website and sponsor decks. Each one engineered to live on a specific platform.
That second layer is where event coverage really earns its budget back. One day of filming becomes about a year of content the FPA can drop into their feed, pitch sponsors with, send to artists they're trying to book, and reuse the following year leading into March when ticket sales open. Honestly, it's the most efficient marketing investment a recurring event can make.
What This Looks Like for Other Organizations
The same playbook works for any group that runs a recurring event — chambers of commerce, nonprofits with annual galas, destinations with festival seasons, businesses with major activations and product launches. You don't film an event because you need a video. You film it because next year's marketing budget will go a lot further when you've got real footage to build on — not stock B-roll, not a slideshow of phone pictures, but a real day captured by people who know how to make it look the way it actually felt.
If you run an event in the Midlands and want next year's promo to look like the real thing, we'd love to talk. And to the Five Points Association: thanks for letting us live inside this one. See you in March.
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