Since COVID, we’ve worked hard to reimagine our work as storytellers by utilizing existing footage in fresh ways, creating animated stories and asking subjects to record themselves remotely. These approaches were drawn from early experiences pivoting our content creation during the pandemic.
Often a failed video comes as a result of unclear goals and audience. Without clearly defined goals and audience, it’s easy for the video to lose its way – it’s confusing, long-winded, lacking emotion and overstuffed with information. Revisit the client’s original goals and audience and ensure that those remain when beginning to tackle the project.
A video production has many moving parts, each incurring its own cost with many variables affecting that cost. Clients often approach us, asking: “how much does a 3 minute video cost?” And we’ll answer, “well, it depends” and then we’ll ask questions. Often, they’ll pause on the answers. So we thought it would be helpful to break down the questions every organization should ask and answer before budgeting a video production.
Organizations often approach us requesting a single video that will do everything for them. It must communicate the nuance of what they do and how, in an emotional and engaging way. “Oh, and can you do it in 2 minutes or less?” Instead, we recommend a collection of video assets that can serve different purposes on multiple platforms. That means using different approaches. Here are 5 types of video every organization needs and why.
We frequently use stock music in our work. Whether it’s for an event-based video or web-only release, music plays a vital role in enhancing emotion, connecting ideas, facilitating narrative flow and adding punch. Here’s our guide for how to best use music libraries in your video content creation.
Authenticity and intimacy are the qualities in our work we are most proud of. These qualities can come from real moments we film as well as interviews we capture during production of videos for non profit and corporate clients. For interviews in particular, we’ve honed a visual approach over the years that we think results in high-quality imagery that feels authentic and intimate. Here’s how we do it.
When developing our long-form documentary films, there’s often an element of discovery in the production process. We’ll spend time with people over the course of weeks, observe them and learn of new opportunities to film. But just as often as we wait for interesting moments to unfold on screen, we also conceive of opportunities to film.
As filmmakers, we wanted to contribute to storytelling during the coronavirus pandemic. But in the early days of the pandemic, we were unsure of how to start; we hadn’t yet considered how to film people safely. We were interested in how kids were processing this time – we are parents of young children – and thought we could ask them to share their perspective through interview and illustration.
In this new world of social distancing, producers must get creative in the ways in which we’re able to continue to create content. One way is to film interviews remotely, using zoom/skype/facetime to direct the subjects and then edit that content in engaging ways. It’s user-generated content on steroids. Here’s some tips for how to capture interviews remotely and produce high quality, useable material.
Shooting interviews in a studio can be an ideal scenario. You’ve got a nice large open space with background options, plenty of lighting and grip, and usually great acoustics and silence when you need it. However, none of that comes for free and without restrictions. Studio time can range from $200/hr to multiple thousands of dollars per day. And it’s not often possible to get all of your interview subjects into the same studio on the same day. So sometimes you have to bring the studio with you. How can you replicate a studio look without a studio? Here’s how we do it.
For this project, we needed to source and manage a locally based video team in Jakarta. Timeline and budget didn’t allow for sending a video team from the USA. We’ve managed international video teams remotely for a variety of projects, meaning we direct and produce from DC while the local team executes our production plan. We then edit all the material in-house to produce the finished video. Here’s some tips we’ve picked up along the way on how to efficiently and effectively work with remote video teams.
This summer we had the pleasure and honor of filming Barack and Michelle Obama for a Netflix special promoting American Factory, the latest documentary from Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar and first in a slate of films produced by the Obama’s Higher Ground production company.