In the 2026 Main Residency Match, 53,373 applicants registered for 41,126 first-year positions, and 48,050 of them submitted a rank order list. Your program was one line on those lists. An NYC residency recruitment video is the part of your recruitment effort that works while you are on service, and in this city it has to do a job no staff hiring video is ever asked to do: help a fourth-year medical student commit three to seven years to a hospital, a specialty and a borough, largely on the strength of what they can see on a screen.
We are Tone Films. We produce recruitment and training films for hospitals, health systems, public-safety agencies and school districts, and we have filmed Match Day itself. What follows is the checklist we work through with a GME office before anyone books a crew.
What this checklist covers
- Why an NYC residency recruitment video is a different brief
- What to lock before you commission an NYC residency recruitment video
- The five scenes that carry a program’s case
- Filming inside a live Manhattan teaching hospital
- What the public system’s expansion changes
- How to tell whether the film worked
- Frequently asked questions
Why an NYC residency recruitment video is a different brief
Start with the arithmetic. The 2026 Main Residency Match results show 41,126 PGY-1 positions offered and 38,354 filled, a fill rate of 93.3 percent. Nationally there were 13,393 ACGME-accredited programs in the most recent ACGME Data Resource Book, covering 2023-2024.
Those numbers describe a market where almost every seat fills. That is exactly why the film matters, and why most programs brief it wrongly. If you will fill regardless, the film’s job is not to fill. Its job is to change who fills, and how high they ranked you.
New York makes that stake unusually large. In the most recent institutional cost report New York State publishes — 2017 figures, unaudited, and the state’s own caveat is worth noting — New York’s table of intern and resident FTEs put NewYork-Presbyterian above 1,500 trainees, Montefiore above 1,200, NYU Langone Hospitals near 1,000 and The Mount Sinai Hospital above 800. Even allowing for the age of that table, this is a city where a single institution trains more residents than many states do.
So an applicant choosing Manhattan is not only choosing a program. They are choosing a system large enough that they will never meet most of it, in a city where their rent, their commute and their call room matter as much as the fellowship match rate. A film that only argues institutional excellence leaves every one of those questions unanswered.
What to lock before you commission an NYC residency recruitment video
Every expensive residency film we have been asked to rescue went wrong before the camera arrived. These eight decisions are the ones that cost money if you defer them.
- The one question the film must answer. Not three. One. “Why would a strong applicant from outside New York rank us first?” is a brief. “Showcase our program” is not.
- Who signs off, named in advance. Program director, GME office, communications and privacy. Four approvers discovered in week three is the single most common cause of a film that never publishes.
- Written consent from every resident on camera. Collected before the shoot day, not chased afterwards. Residents rotate, graduate and occasionally change their minds.
- Your filming window set against the service schedule. Not against the marketing calendar. The people you want on camera are the people with the least discretionary time.
- Patient-free staging decided on paper. Which corridors, which simulation space, which hours. Deciding this on the day costs you the day.
- Two deliverable lengths from one shoot. A main film for the program page and short cuts for everywhere else. Agreeing this upfront changes how we shoot, not just how we edit.
- Where the film will actually live. Program page, institutional channel, interview-day welcome. Each placement implies a different opening five seconds.
- Who owns it next year. A residency film has a shelf life measured in cohorts. Decide now who re-cuts it when this year’s chief residents graduate.
The five scenes that carry a program’s case
Across the recruitment films we have made for health systems, the same five scenes do most of the persuading. Everything else is texture.
- Morning handoff. Nothing else shows an applicant what the team is actually like under mild pressure.
- A teaching moment with a named attending. Applicants are choosing teachers. Show one teaching, not describing teaching.
- The commute. Door to badge reader. In New York this answers the question applicants are too polite to ask on interview day.
- A current resident on the thing they were most worried about. Named worry, honest answer. This is the single most rewatched moment in every film of this kind we have cut.
- Where people live. Housing, roommates, the neighborhood on a Saturday. An applicant is moving their life, not accepting a rotation.
Here is a film we produced around Match Day itself, which is the emotional end of the process your recruitment film sits at the start of:
Filming inside a live Manhattan teaching hospital
Manhattan hospital shoots are won on footprint. A two-person crew with available light and wireless lavs can work a corridor at NewYork-Presbyterian, Mount Sinai or Bellevue between rounds. A five-person crew with track and a jib cannot, and will be asked to leave.
Practical constraints we plan for every time: badge-escorted access rather than open movement, infection-control rules that decide what touches a surface, elevator banks that are clinical traffic first and film logistics never, and a security office that wants the shot list before the crew arrives rather than after.
The best residency films are shot in the gaps in a working day, not in a day cleared for filming. If a program has to stop working to be filmed, you are filming the wrong thing.
The adjacent discipline is research filming, where the approvals are heavier still. We have written separately about filming clinical research in Manhattan hospitals, and the consent and staging habits carry over directly. You can see the range of healthcare work in our portfolio.
What the public system’s expansion changes
Manhattan programs are no longer only competing with programs in other states. In January 2026, NYC Health + Hospitals announced it had secured 75 Medicare-funded residency positions across four annual federal award rounds, distributed across seven of its own hospitals: 17 each at Queens and South Brooklyn Health, 16 at Woodhull, 13 at Lincoln, seven at Elmhurst, three at Kings County and two at Metropolitan.
“We’re excited to grow our residency programs in a way that is forward-looking, sustainable, and rooted in community need.” — Dr. Sewit Teckie, Vice President, Enterprise Clinical Operations, NYC Health + Hospitals
For a GME office this is a recruitment fact, not a policy footnote. Applicants who want high-acuity, high-volume, genuinely diverse training now have more New York options that make that case credibly. If your program’s pitch rested on acuity alone, it needs a second pillar this cycle.
It also changes who commissions these films. Public hospital systems answer to procurement rules and accessibility standards that private academic centers often handle differently, which is why we keep a separate practice for government video production covering public agencies and public health systems.
How to tell whether the film worked
Match outcomes are a blunt instrument for judging a film. Almost every position fills, so “we filled” proves nothing, and a single cohort is too small a sample to read as a trend. We ask programs to watch four softer signals instead, all of which are observable within one cycle.
The first is what applicants ask on interview day. When a film is doing its job, the questions shift away from basics the film already answered and towards specifics, which is the clearest sign it was watched before the interview rather than after.
The second is unprompted mention. Applicants who reference a particular moment — a named attending, a resident’s answer about their first month — are telling you which scene carried your case, and which to lead with next year.
The third is internal pull. If other programs in the institution start asking for their own cut, the film has credibility with the people who know whether it is honest.
The fourth is retention of the film itself. A good NYC residency recruitment video survives two or three cohorts with a light re-cut. If yours feels unusable after one year, the brief was probably about the institution rather than the training.
Frequently asked questions
When should we film an NYC residency recruitment video?
Build backwards from your application season rather than your budget year. A film meant to work while applications are being reviewed has to be finished before that season opens, which in practice means filming while your current cohort is still on service and can speak about the program they actually experienced. Filming after the season opens produces a film for next year’s cycle.
Can we film residents and patients in a working hospital?
Residents, yes, with written consent and your GME office’s sign-off. Patients are a separate question, and the usual answer is to design around them: block shots so patients are out of frame, use corridors and simulation spaces outside care hours, and stage closed-room scenes with standing staff rather than filming real encounters. Your institution’s privacy and communications offices set that rule, not the crew.
How long should the film be?
Two lengths from one shoot. A main film of roughly two to three minutes for the program page, plus 30 to 60 second cuts for the places applicants actually scroll. A single long film tends to go unwatched; cuts alone give an applicant no way to understand the program as a whole.
What makes a residency film different from a staff recruitment video?
The audience and the stakes. A staff hiring video speaks to someone choosing a job they could leave next year. A residency film speaks to someone choosing three to seven years of training they cannot easily change, in a city they may not know, on a rank order list they submit once. It has to answer where they will live and who will teach them, not only why the institution is excellent.
Do we need a separate film for every program?
No, and attempting it is usually a mistake. One institutional film carries the city, the hospital and the culture; short program-specific pieces carry the call structure, the fellowship pathways and the faculty. That gives internal medicine and dermatology something true to each without funding fourteen separate shoots.
Start with the program that under-filled
If one of your programs slipped down applicants’ lists this year, that is the brief. We would rather make one honest film for the program that needs it than a glossy institutional piece that serves none of them. As an NYC video production company working across Midtown, Chelsea, the Financial District and the wider Manhattan hospital systems, we can usually scout, shoot and deliver inside a single cohort’s calendar.
Tell us which program under-filled and we will tell you what it would take to film it.
About the author — Andrei Tone is the founder and director of Tone Films, a video production company with studios in 45 U.S. cities. He has directed films for police and fire departments, 9-1-1 districts, school districts, hospitals and brands including Disney Junior and Cuisine Solutions.
