The Brief

We start with a pre-production meeting, usually over Skype to develop a solid brief with you and your colleagues so that we are fully prepared before the shoot. This is the time for your customers to sign release forms, engage talent, book rooms for our interviews and provide photos or floor plans of the location/s.  Any corporate guidelines, logos, fonts or customer supplied footage, can be delivered now. From here you can expect a director's treatment and pre-shoot script so that you can understand how we plan to visualise your story. We can then proceed with booking crews and making travel arrangements.

The Shoot

Every shoot is different- but to cause minimum disruption to your customer, we often use small, unobtrusive equipment which is faster to set up. We have a small crew of 3 for the shoot (director, cinematographer, sound recordist). Interviews (usually up to 2- one with CXO/senior business leader and one with the technical expert- we recommend partners let their customer give them praise rather than the partner appearing in the interview). Interviews are filmed early in the morning then we spend the rest of the day/s filming visuals either on site, with staff using the technology or at another relevant location. It generally takes ½ hour to set up for a shot so we try to limit our travel. No major preparation is required from the customer except to mock up a staff meeting or other event on site or to provide location information/arrange room bookings, car parks etc. A few simple tips are here.

The Edit

Editing typically takes approx. 3-5 days but we space this out with 2 days between each review stage to give you time (depending on how many stakeholders you have and if they’re timely with feedback). There are 3 review cycles, with a 'lock-off' at each stage so that we don't back track. Firstly we ask you to review the script in Word. Next, you can review a video of the interview only and lastly, you can view the full video with music/visuals/graphics/sound design/sound clean-up/colour grade. We usually give your customer a preview towards the last stages of editing as a courtesy. You also receive a full interview transcript in Word which makes it easier to keep a record of the entire content which you can use to build your written case study- it’s full of customer quotes! The final high resolution file is delivered via Vimeo to standard specifications unless otherwise stated.

During the briefing process, we will ask you about animations, montages, special effects, text over image, titles, colour grade look, subtitles and any lower third clear space requirements for branding or social media uploads such as Facebook's Canvas.  You may like to add cinemagraphs as well.