I just finished a massive project producing the multimedia for the Harvey B. Gantt Center‘s annual Jazzy Holiday Luncheon. For the project, I got to interview a number of amazing people, including Harvey Gantt himself, Dr. Henry Louis Gates as well as many others.
One of the videos I produced was a profile piece on Sally and Russell Robinson – two influential community leaders and arts patrons from Charlotte – who were one of the Gantt Center’s honorees at the luncheon. Like most projects I work on, the majority of what we shot did not relate to the story I was trying to tell about them and was thus cut from the finished piece. One excerpt from my interview with the Robinsons, however, that did not make it into their final piece I had to share. In it, Russell Robinson recounts a traumatic experience he had growing up in Charlotte, NC when he and another white child started playing with two African American children in their neighborhood in the 1930s and were confronted by the police.
Earlier this year I had the privilege of working with the YWCA Central Carolinas to produce a video that played during their annual fundraiser – the We Believe Luncheon. The video was meant to describe what the organization does, explain how it affects those who participate in their various programs and encourage donors attending the luncheon to give to the YWCA.
In our first meeting, the staff and I discussed a number of themes and objectives to aim for in the video. In addition to telling the personal stories of the YWCA participants who agreed to be interviewed, we also wanted to touch on the history of the YWCA.
During a tour of their facility on Park Road in South Charlotte, I noticed a number of beautiful old photographs along the walls that the YWCA had taken over the years. Although the photos were decades old, they still closely resembled the day-to-day business of the current YWCA. I thought these photos would be a great way to convey the history of the organization and provide a great visual aesthetic with which to begin and end the video without taking up too much time in the narrative.
Production still from YWCA Central Carolinas shoot
To do this, the staff and I identified six photos to reinterpret for the video. We staged the scenarios from the photos with present-day actors (played by actual YWCA participants). I held up the original photos as references for my cinematographer, Ben Premeaux, to match with his camera. Then in post-production, I dissolved between the photos and the corresponding video footage and added some sound effects to complete the scenes.
Beginning and ending the video this way gave a greater context to the narrative, but it also added a great introduction and ending to the video. Since the primary purpose of the video was to play to a live audience at the luncheon, the 30 second intro gave the audience some time to settle into what they were about to watch, and the final 20 seconds of the video (which also featured this photo-to-video technique) provided nice symmetry and a gradual winding down of the narrative to end the video.
The video played to an audience of 800 people at the Westin Charlotte on February 19, 2013 and is available for viewing on the YWCA Central Carolinas’ website.
2013 ‘We Believe’ Luncheon video playing at the Westin Charlotte
Food blogger and activist, Vani Hari, writes for her own blog, foodbabe.com, where she discusses food policy, writes recipes and provides healthy lifestyle tips.
Hari updates her site frequently with content (usually a few times a week) – using mostly text and photography in her blog posts. Video is less common, but she has experimented with it intermittently. Prior to her hiring me, she’d uploaded 12 videos to her website, averaging about 4,500 views/video. Some of them are recordings of Hari’s guest appearances on news programs. The rest she produced herself and were shot on low end, consumer grade video cameras featuring no more than one or two shots edited together.
Adding High Quality Video and Storytelling to the Mix
In addition to her blogging career, Hari was also a North Carolina delegate at the 2012 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Charlotte. While she was carrying out her formal obligations during the convention, she also advocated for food policy reform, pressuring lawmakers to endorse legislation that would require food companies to label genetically modified organisms (GMO) on their packaging. To tell this story, she volunteered to allow a cinematographer to follow her around during the DNC to document her experience, and she hired me to assist in the development of the storyline and script as well as edit the footage to create her own video.
The narrative for the video included her experience at the DNC as well as a call to action for viewers to become involved in food advocacy, specifically by voting for or supporting Proposition 37 in California – a bill that would have required California food producers to label GMOs. She posted the video along with an article she wrote and photographs that she took at the DNC in a blog post titled “The United State of GMOs.”
Results
Because she already had a large following online, it wasn’t a surprise that the video quickly gained many views soon after she posted it. Less expected was how well the blog post (as a whole) would perform. The page (with the written article, photographs and video) has been “liked” over 4,000 times on Facebook – becoming one of the most popular posts on her blog. At the posting of this article, the video has 133 likes on YouTube – more than all of her other uploaded videos combined – and has been viewed 8,627 times.
Obviously a large part of the blog post’s success was because of Hari’s hard work building her audience. However, that it performed so much better than many of her other articles can be directly attributed to integrating high quality video production and storytelling into her presentation. The video is still on Hari’s homepage and continues to get steady views.
It seemed logical that the first blog post for my new website should be about creating my new website.
My goal was to create something sleek, simple and scalable, so I could easily add more examples of my work without running out of space or disrupting the overall look of the site. I settled on a mosaic thumbnail gallery for my portfolio and homepage which is comprised of stills from my videos that link to corresponding project pages. This makes for a wonderful visual diversity of color, shape and style. It also instantly displays a large body of work.
Because I’m a freelancer, I’m constantly trying to court new clients. My website is often the first thing prospective clients see when they’re considering me for hire. Therefore, in addition to creating something aesthetically pleasing, I also wanted it to be easy to navigate so that the overall experience of visiting the site was enjoyable.
The website is organized into four simple sections: a portfolio, a page about me, my blog and a contact form. It’s in this order so that visitors (ideally) get hooked by my portfolio, reeled in by my personality, educated by my blog and then through that experience feel compelled to reach out to hire me for a gazillion dollars.
Though the site is simple, it’s loaded with content. It features many of my professional projects, some of my student films and projects I’ve worked on just for fun. My portfolio also randomizes the order of the videos so each time you refresh the homepage you are presented with a new set of projects. Visitors can spend hours watching videos on my site or flip through it quickly and still absorb a lot of information.
Thanks for visiting! I’ll be updating it regularly, so don’t be a stranger, and come back soon, ya hear?
