DIY Video Helps Gather Content
Project Leaders Become Videographers/Photographers
Sometimes we get to have fun with the craft. Recently, one of our major clients asked us to produce a video about how to capture good video with a cell phone.
This client, Alpha Building Corporation, is the one that had the visionary idea of producing an intranet site for their employees, where they could house everything from on-boarding videos to HR information to financial reports to reports from the CEO. Since their operations are spread out over several states, they found their employees are interested in what is going on in other areas.
The problem they had was how to get reports from their different areas of operation without major expense. Sending a video crew to all those remote locations did not seem practical. But… Eureka!… Every employee has a video camera in their pocket! It’s their cell phone. They just needed to encourage them to use it, and maybe offer a little instruction on how to capture good quality video.
So, the idea was proposed to us. We immediately responded that there are all sorts of cellphone video and photography tips and tricks already on the internet. Just do a YouTube search. But, no, the client wanted something personalized, targeted to their employees, featuring their CEO and specifically dealing with what they thought their employees would want to know.
So, it became a project. Working with Alpha’s marketing department the script went through multiple revisions until we thought we had it right. But when we broke the script out into a shot list, we found showing all these different operations was going to be a more costly project than any of us had anticipated.
The solution seemed to be to minimize what we needed to shoot, using stock images to show the various things we discussed in the script. The resulting video may lack a unified look, but it still gets the point across, and was completed at a low cost. And, most importantly, the client is happy.
It still took many hours of editing, which our associate Brandon Sappington provided as his initial project produced in the Bauhaus edit suites. He loves that Bauhaus always has the latest and greatest in hardware and software, making complex editing projects far less of a chore and more like the fun that got him into editing in the first place.
These segments can be used on their own, but also may later be edited into larger projects. The final product is now on the Alpha intranet site, known as Alpha TV, and can be viewed here:
