Project Brief
A project brief was created alongside the client to determine the requirements for this video, look/feel, and any restrictions to consider.
Mood and Inspirations
Originally this video was meant to serve as a tug on heartstrings so that the Children’s Aid audience would empathize and sympathize in the struggle that a majority of children experience within New York—and their families. During this portion of the project, i reserached possible inspriations of short videos that play on the heartstrings concept to deliver an emotinal message. This was meant as a research initative to see what elements help achieve the goal of invoking emotional investment.
The story outline
Once the client understood the type of video we were aiming to create, we began drafting a story outline to ensure we’re all on the same page of what type of visuals and narrative we’re aiming to portray. During this phase we drafted 4 possible storylines or narratives in which we can create using the material that the shot by the client’s video team.
The Storyboard without footage
One of our biggest hurdles was to create a storyboard without access to footage. The footage we needed was not available by the production team at that very moment, but we could not wait to review the footage to see what we had to work with. To help minitgiate wasting time, we created a storyboard following shots that was described to use by the client that they were confident they had. This lead down a rough path to create a story and visually stitch pieces of footage together to match.
A new narrative
After receiving all of the footage from the client’s production team, there was a pivot in terms of the goal for this video. Instead of video that were to tuh on heartstrings, the aim shifted to sharing more about the event’s impact to the organization and ultimately the live of familes and children in New York. This make the storyboard shift quite a bit and introduced more motion design into the picture. You can see in the opening scenes, we attempted to incorporate a multi-frame introduction and lead to the main story of the video.
Searching through endless sea of footage
Going through footage is part of the video editing process. However the biggest challenge was the footage was all stiiched together in three 4-hour long threads. The footage was not organized in a specific manner. Our team as well as our main contact from the client has to sift through the entire of the video files to find timestamps in which we can cut and export or organize into particular segments. This caused a 3-4 day delay in our editing process in that some specific clips could not be found, but were confident that were there. After organizing the footage, we finally were able to begin the true editing phase.
20 Drafts to a sweet outcome
To reach the final edit, we went through a total of 20 drafts. The reason for so many drafts was that specific individuals featured in the video were no longer a part of the organization or transitioned out while in the middle of editing this video. As a gesture of respect, they requested that we remove them. However, that would alter how the narrative played so we had to shift the story to still keep the main structure but remove some details. Further, stakeholders wanted to swap out the soundtrack which would alter the pacing of the entire video. This required us to re-mix a new soundtrack and reconfigure the pacing to match. By the end, we came out with a favored video by the Children’s Aid Development Team and was able to gift the client with an flexible closing card for other video endeavors.
