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.
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.
