Video
Project: Object Storage 101 Series
The project was to create a series of educational short videos to provide information about object storage. At the time object storage was a relatively new approach for storing and managing data. And part of the mission statement at SwiftStack was to also help provide a venue for education on the storage architecture approach.
Plan: Conversational Education
SwiftStack was created as a business to build convenient business data management solutions off the open source OpenStack Swift object storage system. As part of the contribution to the project development on the promotion of the approach, education came hand in hand. So we came up with a game plan to produce a small series of videos that respond and attempt to answer questions that the larger sales force at our company were often being asked.
Production Time: 1 Week
Inspiration: Mentors
This was one of my first on-site video shoots. I had only worked on videos I produced or from content I created from online stock. I found great support and help from the project producer, our marketing VP at the time. He was a veteran at this point of both being in front of the camera and behind it.
Production:
Key highlights of the production life cycle
Working with at the time VP of marketing we applied his project outline as “cue cards” to a white board to help our team mates flow naturally between subjects without needing a dedicated script. This made the conversational nature of the video feel more natural.
To save production budget and time, especially since one of the key on-camera contributors is a remote worker we found one of our large meeting rooms ideal and quickly commenced production when he was next in our corporate office. We set up our own camera equipment and lighting purchased by our founder who was always eager to create video content.
Because we wanted the videos to be as natural as possible we shot for one take. In this case mess ups were mostly ok because of the nature of our goal. However there was still a lot of work on picking the right time to switch the camera. And a good amount of on the sound editing portion by removing noise inbetween speaking segments and layering in the audio track from each microphone.
I think many companies are fortunate to have a great available platform like YouTube to host and share their content, and we were no exception. This makes things so much easier when it comes to sharing, embedding on webpages and to get basic analytic information But most importantly allows our audience and potential customers the ability to easily digest what we offer with a very low threshold of inconvenience.
Production:
Key highlights of the production life cycle
Working with at the time VP of marketing we applied his project outline as “cue cards” to a white board to help our team mates flow naturally between subjects without needing a dedicated script. This made the conversational nature of the video feel more natural.
To save production budget and time, especially since one of the key on-camera contributors is a remote worker we found one of our large meeting rooms ideal and quickly commenced production when he was next in our corporate office. We set up our own camera equipment and lighting purchased by our founder who was always eager to create video content.
Because we wanted the videos to be as natural as possible we shot for one take. In this case mess ups were mostly ok because of the nature of our goal. However there was still a lot of work on picking the right time to switch the camera. And a good amount of on the sound editing portion by removing noise inbetween speaking segments and layering in the audio track from each microphone.
I think many companies are fortunate to have a great available platform like YouTube to host and share their content, and we were no exception. This makes things so much easier when it comes to sharing, embedding on webpages and to get basic analytic information But most importantly allows our audience and potential customers the ability to easily digest what we offer with a very low threshold of inconvenience.
