The launch of teamwork.com this month was a groundbreaking one for us in terms of rebranding. It gave us the opportunity to showcase, both to new and existing customers, and what it is about teamwork.com that makes us stand out from our competitors. Part of the rebranding also included remaking the homepage video.
This blog post may not appeal to some of you but I thought some readers may be interested to find out exactly what’s involved in putting together a short explainer video including the amount of time and number of people it can take to produce it.
What I wanted to get across in the video was how teamwork.com can benefit users and companies as well as to highlight some of the great features within the application.
The style of video I was aiming for was a real world video, meaning I wanted to make a video that had actual people in it instead of just screencasts and animations. This type of video appealed to me the most because I feel people respond and relate a lot more to the actual content. The visuals are also far more engaging and interesting.
If the intention is to hold people’s attention for two minutes, then being able to see real shots of the app in use, combined with interesting visual effects to highlight features in my opinion is the best and most effective video style. Showing real shots of the app in use, combined with interesting visual effects to highlight features, is the best and most effective video style, in my opinion.
One of the hardest parts of this project was the timeline. When we decided to go for it, it was Tuesday the 7th of January. We already had the launch of Teamwork.com planned for the 23rd of January, so there was just a few weeks to pull the entire production together.
Wednesday the 8th
The first thing we did was hold a brainstorming session to get people’s feedback on what using an application like teamwork.com meant to them. We asked a lot about the benefits which people had experienced and what features were important to them.
We then took this further and began to break the whole idea and feeling behind the video into keywords that we wanted to carry through the video.
The keywords we came up with were: Belong, Appreciated, Team, Easy, and In-control.
Next we studied the breakdown of industries currently using teamwork.com, and designed the production to target potential customers within specific sectors. Creative Agencies, be they web, advertising, marketing or design, are the leading users of teamwork.com so we wanted to gear the video towards this sector.
Friday the 10th
With this information we then started to design characters that we thought would fit into this agency world that we were creating. We came up with character outlines. Next was plotting and building out the rough timeline for key points in the story.
Once all this had been achieved I started writing the script. Having already developed the characters and picked the specific benefits that we wanted to highlight made the script writing process much more focused.
I wrote the script along with Mark, who was looking after the visual effects for the project. We then ran through the script and highlighted the features we wanted to show in each scene. This was important for us to work out early on so that when it came to storyboarding, the shots I was creating would allow for the graphics to be overlaid.
Monday 13th
The next step was taking the script and building out the storyboard for the entire video. As one of the team said: ‘plan and plan some more’. Having the whole script storyboarded made sure we didn’t miss any key shots while shooting and it also enabled me to really plan out the exact shooting schedule for the days.
Of course during all this there were ongoing conversations with casting directors trying to find talent sending our character breakdowns to individual agents to find the most suitable actors for the roles.
Tuesday 14th
Location scouting was the main order of the day. We spent the first part of the day viewing and locking down locations for the shoot. Matt, the director of photography (DP) joined me for the location scout to ensure suitability for filming and to work out the best angles to shoot from at each location. This also then gave us an idea of the amount of lighting and equipment we would require for the days.
In the previous year we had sponsored and mentored at a number of Start Up weekends in Auckland, and through some of the people I met at these events, we were put in touch with the amazing team at the co-working space Bizdojo in Auckland city. This was to be the location for the agency as well as the clients office. The team at Bizdojo were incredible and made us feel very welcome and were a huge help. The other two outside locations were also filmed throughout Auckland city.
The next piece in the puzzle was to lock down the crew. I had to find lighting and sound crews for the shoot and was lucky to find some really talented people for these roles.
That afternoon Josh, who was working as an assistant DP and I, spent the next six hours in a casting office. We interviewed all the potential actors, running through the script with them. We finished late that night with the casting director giving us a great piece of advice: he told us to sleep on it and not to make a final decision until the next day. This would enable us to approach the process with fresher eyes.
Wednesday the 15th
After an early breakfast it was time to review the casting footage and select our actors. Following the advice from the night before was great, and we ended up with a cast we were incredibly happy with.
Once we were sure we then made the calls to agents and started to move forward.
With the actors on board the other key person I needed was hair and makeup, so calls were placed and the amazingly talented Abby was found. As it turns out she had won New Zealand film and TV awards for her work before so we were incredibly lucky to have her on board. Due to a thriving film industry in New Zealand over the last number of years thanks to the likes of The Hobbit, the quality of talent available here is world class.
The rest of the day, and long into the night, was spent on planning the shooting schedules for both the Thursday and Friday along with many tweaks to the script. For this process I must recommend an app that helped a huge amount called ‘Shotlister’. I was able to take photos of all the storyboard, add extra details to them, then schedule how long each shot would take along with the order and the time of day for each individual shot. Then I was able to output it to PDF for printing. This became my production bible. It kept the whole shoot on schedule and allowed me to make sure I captured everything that was required as well as enable me to communicate the shots and what I was looking for from each person on the crew.
Thursday 16th: First day of shooting
After more pre-production work and planning the food for the cast and crew on the day, the first day of filming kicked off at 2pm. It was an absolute non-stop session. The first shot took about 2 hours to get under way. There was a lot of lighting to get into place and it always just takes that little bit longer for the first shot of the day in a new location with a new crew.
We shot the very first scene, and then the very last scene, first due to the lighting setups. This is where the shot list becomes vital : to keep track of what is done and what is left to shoot since the whole script is normally shot out of sequence. The shoot continued flat out until 12am. Then it was time to head back to the hotel to rest, review the shots and to start adjusting the plans for the next day.
Friday 17th
We had planned to start at 12pm but due to how disruptive we were in a functioning office we had to push out our start time in the office location to 6pm instead. This meant I had to re-schedule all the shots and locations to work around this. Trying to do this while shooting the day before did cause a few issues that took time to resolve. I now understand why there are so many people involved in shoots. The logistics involved for a basic film shoot just amazed me. I can’t even begin to imagine what’s involved in big budget movie productions.
Filming for the project wrapped just before 2am.
Saturday 18th.
After 20 hours of filming we had 80 minutes of footage to go though. After a hurried drive back home to Tauranga, I began arranging and organising the project for editing, deciding to use Adobe PremierPro for the job.
Sunday 19th
By the end of the day I had the first cut of the video put together. It was coming in around 2 minutes and 20 seconds and it was really starting to take shape now. A few big shots had been cut which is always hard to do when you know what went into producing them, but in editing you have to be pretty ruthless.
Monday 20th: Three days to deadline
In the morning I sat with Mark and we went through the first cut of the video and discussed the effects and how and where they would fit into the shots. Mark then started work on creating all the visuals you see throughout the video using Adobe After effects for all this work.
Tuesday 21st
As Mark was adding effects he was uploading previews to dropbox so I could access them, test them in the cut so we could discuss and then tweak them as required. Dropbox turned out to be great for this process. During this time I had improved the cut further and had the video down to and running at 1:58 seconds. The goal was to keep the whole video under two minutes, so I was delighted with this.
Wednesday 22nd
While I worked with Mark finalising the graphics and grading of the video I had passed on the sound to be mastered and mixed. Once all these elements came together, the last thing I had left to add was a few sound effects and by the end of the day and after a total of 50 hours post production work we had finally finished the video.
The feeling of seeing the final video come together with all the effects, colour grading, sound and music in exactly the way I had hoped was just such a massive buzz. The fact that we also managed to pull it off in the incredibly short timeframe was also a huge achievement for all involved and it was this time pressure that united the whole crew : a lot of people didn’t think it was possible. In the end it came down to a few things: pre-production, plan, plan and plan some more, and keep it simple.
You’ll find the new video on our homepage at teamwork.com and we hope you enjoy it.
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