Guest Article by Jack Sheard of Kino Studio.
In this article, I am going to share with you how we successfully produce video products for the web and tell you about how we applied our approach with one of our clients.
The main challenge faced by our clients is that they don�t know what kind of message they want to send to their target audience. They are often also very apprehensive about the whole film making process. Worries which lead to questions such as “Will I be able to make changes to the film after shooting?” and “I don’t know what it is going to look like, so how can I agree to commence work?”.
Use a creative framework
In order to reassure our clients we use a creative process which provides a framework for delivering a quality end product. This has three main stages of workflow:
- Find the story, the message will come
- Kick off discussion, explain how things will happen
- Pre-production, scripting and storyboarding (AKA Planning)
Find the story
For us, no matter what we are producing (photography, film, marketing campaign, etc), we have to find the story first. This is where all ideas come from. Humankind has been telling and sharing stories for thousands of years. It’s in our nature. How many gossips do you know? For us as a marketing media company, it is our aim to help get people talking about things. So, we use story to help us. With a client, we will sit down initially, and have a big discussion about what they do, and why they feel it is important (Story is usually found when answering the ‘Why?’ question). Like a ‘sell out’ investigative journalist, we probe and dig to find this basic humanistic story that will help spread the marketing message.
Engage the client
Armed with the story, we will then power up the creative machine! We go to town and generate concepts that we feel will tell this message. We can then discuss our ideas with our client. This allows us to have input from the clients perspective, and also ensure we have understood the brief for the project. The result is that we have a direction to go with our final concepts and are moving closer to a fully developed final product.
To address client concerns over not knowing what they will be getting, we storyboard how we see the final product looking. We will also try to include examples of existing work that we have drawn inspiration from. This is all designed to help us communicate to our client what they will be getting. We know what it will look like, but we really need to ensure our client is happy. After all, they are taking a bit of a leap into the unknown.
Plan to stay ahead
Now, possibly the most important moment from our point of view, we get sign off from our client to continue. This is key with any development project – know who’s going to sign off, when they will need to sign something off and then get them to sign off. We have to pass through these ‘gates’ to help narrow down where we will go creatively. This is where future changes get locked out, we are saying to our client “Are you sure you want to do this? Tell us now, because changing this decision later will mean we need to start again”
With every production being different, the approach we take from here varies. If it is a filming project, we would move into preproduction and ready the scripts, shooting schedule, locations, etc. We would then capture all of the footage required to produce the final production. To ensure that we are still on the right track, we would then produce a ‘rough cut’ for our client. This is an edit of the final film that has not yet been ‘polished’ and is purely to show how the film flows, the order of the content and the soundtrack choices. It allows our client to see (at last) what we have been trying to describe all this time. It is also a very nerve racking time for us, because, we are offering up our creative work for (constructive) criticism.
Usually, in an ideal situation, we would receive a list of changes to implement so we can complete the final edit. These changes tend to relate to market motivations. Our clients know their target market and they know what turns them on and off. So, sometimes we pitch the motivation slightly off – but this is why feedback is an integral part of our process. After we have received this feedback, we put the film into final production where we tighten up all the edits, apply the soundtrack and colour grade for the final look. Once we’ve completed this stage, making changes to the edit are more difficult and take longer to achieve. So, we try to avoid it as much as possible. But, inevitably, there is always something so we have to remain agile whilst trying to deliver the story in an entertaining way.
Client case-study – bebionic
As I mentioned at the start, story is what we try to capture. People share stories and find them interesting and entertaining. So, as an example of how we’ve put this into action, I would like to tell you a little story. Bebionic is a fantastic technological achievement. It is the mosts advanced artificial prosthetic hand. RSLSteeper put a lot of time into developing something that would both function beyond currently available prostheses, but would also look more realistic. Bebionic is the culmination of all that hard work.
We were tasked with helping them produce web video content to spread the word about bebionic. People needed to know both what this product could do from a technical stand point, and also why it is important. As I said earlier, the ‘Why?’ is where the story lives and it is where we are most interested. It was decided that the best approach to telling the why, would be to talk to a user and find out how they feel about it. We would also produce a teaser trailer that would motivate the technical audience – specifically engadget.com . The approach should be different and should also challenge how prosthetics are viewed. Less ‘clinical and disability’ and more ‘Technology and bionic man’.
The focus of the story was going to be how bebionic hand improved the life of our user by enabling him to perform more day to day tasks with a ‘more human’ looking hand. What we uncovered from interviewing him, was more deeply satisfying AND more interesting. This was something that we could never have seen or scripted! Nigel told us that when he used existing prosthesis, he could tell that people were staring at him and trying not to notice him. He said that when this happens, you tend to shrink a little and wonder all the time ‘am I being stared at?’. With the bebionic, which is a product that looks so technologically awesome and terminator-like, he loved people looking and asking him about it! It was something that was so fantastic to him, that it gave him even more confidence. This was a story that went beyond the technical. This went down to core of how people feel when they use this product.
Since this point, Nigel has become an advocate for bebionic and is now travelling the world telling these stories to large crowds of people! Just search your favourite video sharing site for bebionic and you will more than likely come across Nigel presenting. This product changed his life in more ways than one.
To see Nigel’s story and the ‘tech-teaser’ we produced for engadget.com, please view our portfolio at http://www.kino-studios.com/film.aspx.
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