Corporations Aren’t People - But it’s Fun to Play Pretend
Client: SOS International
Agency: Bluetext
Role: Video Producer, Interviewer, Creative Direction
Year: 2019
Documentary video production flexes the two best creative muscles: investigation and interpretation.
On one hand, the documentarist is a witness to the story which they are uncovering. On the other, they are visionary, shaping what they witness into something new and inviting. This process could not be more appealing to me. While I have produced zero true documentaries in my lifetime - I do get the opportunity to incorporate this personal passion into my professional life through numerous “Brand Essence” videos.
In one particular example, the largest private government contractor in the country needed a video to celebrate their 30th Anniversary. Bluetext’s director of video, the magnificent Erik Fong, and I were able to create something a bit more special than your typical corporate storytell.
After six rough cuts and some hefty creative vs. corporate bargaining, here is the final cut which played in front of thousands of the client’s birthday party guests at DC’s National Building Museum.
Three W’s of Interview: Why? Why? Why?
The video was supposed to be three minutes. The production lasted a month, from kickoff to final cut. We wanted to document the corporation’s special sauce that allowed for 30 years of success and growth.
32 people in 2 days was a madhouse of post-production, but see our great idea below!
As lead interviewer, I learned so much in those two days.
My most important takeaway from that investigational marathon:
When interviewing someone without experience, never ask open-ended questions.
Instead, get them on topic and follow up any juicy piece of their answer with “Why do you think that is?”. Once I had them talking about what they felt strongly about, I pushed “but why?” over and over again until the topic is exhausted.
At first, my questions led to the story we wanted to tell. After many awkward, dead-end responses - I realized they didn’t care about what I thought about their company.
I was missing the real story in search of a phantom one.
Once I figured that out, we got the soundbites to weave an authentic narrative.
Expirement: Emotional Mapping
After an impressive 32 interviews and b-roll, we were left with a mountain of footage. Traditionally, we transcribe dialogue and then hunt down the best soundbites and make a narrative out of them.
However, we had not the time nor the courage to sift through that amount of dialogue in a traditional sense. Erik came up with the elegant idea of using an emotional map to steer our story.
So, we scrubbed through the dialogue, categorizing infinite soundbites by emotion.
We collected all the different emotions that drive the company: excitement, curiosity, exhaustion, pride, surprise, etc. We then assembled an emotional landscape, via post-it notes on a whiteboard. Instead of doing it in premier, we arranged and re-arranged various emotional journeys on which we could take the viewer.
We had a blast arranging different emotional rollercoasters on that whiteboard and fantasizing music which could support or contrast.
Emotional mapping brought us to the cold open and the cliff-hanger ending. We were able to create something more elegant and more sincere than a typical brand essence video. Win!
