This is the corporate promotional video that I produced, with one other teammate, for a client. It is displayed on their YouTube channel and embedded into their website.
The process started off with us being given a brief to create a promotional corporate video for the biology department of Wyke Sixth Form college. Once looking over what we had to do, we researched numerous promotional corporate videos like what we had to produce, in order to fully understand the conventions and what was required of us.
Once confident in our roles, we moved onto formulating and fleshing out our ideas for what we could do. Part of this included conducting a location recce at Wyke Sixth Form college, allowing us to both learn our way around the site and get a feel for the shots that would be possible to capture. We also created preliminary storyboards as a proof of concept. We had to research, and find a source for, the equipment that we planned on using. From this, we created and conducted a video pitch to our client, using a green-screen so that we could chroma key ourselves into the video. After a successful pitch, the project was greenlit. At this point we created many more storyboards, wrote a script and created a filming schedule for interviews and rooms that we booked out.
In Production, we captured the story-boarded shots, interviews and other miscellaneous footage in-between this. As the college is a fast-paced, ever changing environment, we did face some difficulties with some scheduled interviews falling through, as well as certain rooms no longer being available to film in. In these cases, we rescheduled whenever possible, and improvised other shots when not. We used the Canon 1300D and a tripod for the bulk of this, as well as a drone and dolly for more advanced shots.
Post-production was completed on Adobe Premiere Pro. Initially, we closely followed the the storyboards that we produced to edit together a first draft. By doing this, it saved us a lot of time rather than trying to edit together the footage from scratch. We then reviewed the first draft, making notes on what parts that we liked as well as the parts that were lacking. From these notes, we then went over the video again, becoming more experimental in the way that we edited, without losing the core structure. One of the key points that we found was that our shots in the first draft often lingered seconds too long, and therefore the video didn't flow well - so we cut these shot lengths down, going for a faster pace.
This experience of creating a corporate video has been brilliant for developing my skills. It has highlighted to me how crucial pre-production is to the success of a project, as it truly does make the production and post-production process much less chaotic. I have also become much more adept at using editing software (in this case Adobe Premier Pro), cutting out many inefficiencies that I started off with through the usage of shortcuts and learning the interface. A weakness in this project that I am determined to iron out in the next one is the audio quality. For this project we used microphones that were built into the cameras - whilst not awful, it isn't great, and you can definitely tell the difference between the audio in this and other professional content. Next time, I will use separate microphones to capture much higher quality audio.
