Video Production Workflow

Step 1: Determine the Goal

Our client had two objectives for this video: First, as a testimonial piece for residents of the local Mission to show them that there truly is hope through salvation. Second, to be shown to patrons in the clients annual banquet in order to let them know the money they are sowing is saving lives.

Step 2: Spirit Storm Ideas

The spirit-storm sessions for this particular project were really a series of meetings with the client and mission leaders. After a couple meetings we determined that they wanted to do something that was contemporary and hip. At this point the Marketing Ministries team came up with several creative ideas. We chose the top three ideas and developed three separate scripts, which were presented to the mission leaders. With every project the budget is always the deciding factor, so we needed to make sure that our ideas would cover a range of budgets so the mission leaders would feel very comfortable in choosing one.

Step 3: Determine the Budget

The decision was made to use a True Hollywood Stories format. This worked out well for all involved, as we were familiar with the workflow and we were able to give a very accurate estimate on the projected editing time (35-40 hours) for a project in this format. The only variable was the shooting schedule.

Step 4: Determine your Talent and Shoot Schedule

We interviewed four potential Mission candidates. There were several factors we needed to consider before deciding who should be the talent for this project. We needed someone who was accountable and who had several family members or friends in the surrounding area so we didn’t have to travel far to record testimonies (remember travel equals money, money that the budget couldn’t afford).

Once we felt comfortable with our chosen talent we then had to know and understand his story in order for us to re-tell it, so we brought the talent into our studio for his initial recorded interview. Interviewing him first allowed us to get to know his story and identify key people in his life who would be instrumental in helping us re-tell his story. We shot his testimony in the studio for two hours. We then set up another shoot date at his work location so that we could have a variety of shot types to pull from, which helps achieve the goal our client had of being modern and hip with the video (this second shoot consisted of two hours travel, one-and-a-half hours setup/tear down, and two hours of shooting).

We would later contact and set-up recording times with other key people (friends and family) so we would have outside testimonies about our talent. The Mission helped us contact the friends and relatives, and once we got buy-in from them, we set up a shoot date and time for the friends and relatives to come into the studio. This administrative time took about 7-10 hours to set up 5 individuals to shoot.

Step 5 : Finalize Script determine Voiceover

In this particular script, it was important for us to connect with a diverse audience, and one way to do this is to include several different topics so a wider range of people will have a connection with the final video. Personally, I think this is the coolest thing about doing a script like this. It’s not everyday you have an opportunity to connect with your audience by telling a story from an era that they lived through. By showing this temporal relationship the audience can better understand the situations the world was going through when events that were happing to the talent were taking place. The audience’s decisions in life, and the talents decisions were different, but both can relate to one another when they think, “I remember that. I was doing ___ when that happened.”

After we had finalized the script we sent it to the Mission leaders for approval. Once they signed off, we began to think about the Voice Over (VO) talent, we put up an audition, and the floodgates opened with different voice over talent. We made our decision by constantly considering what the client wanted in a final product, so we chose a VO artist whom we felt had a contemporary sound.

Step 6 : Shoot and editing schedule

We ended up shooting five individuals in the studio for about four hours of studio time, plus one-hour set up and one hour tear down. We now had about fifteen hours of footage to utilize for a five-minute video.

In the editing room we had to lay down the talent’s initial story; this gave our video its foundation. Once the editor got that cut to about fifteen minutes, we called in the producer to cut it down even more. This is always the hardest part of the process, cutting your video down so that it still tells a complete story and you get your point across in less than 6 minutes.

Step 7 : Review and Revisions

After we believe we had a solid foundation for the video we then go in and add cut away shots by using b-roll footage we accumulate. For example, in this project we used several pictures that the talent had given us. Pictures of friends, family, wedding pictures, anything that he felt might help us represent visually what he saying aurally. In this particular case, we didn’t have too much to represent the talents life before he was saved, so we had to resort to using his old drivers license photo on several occasions.

Step 8 : Final Product Approval

Once we had the video to where we thought it really told the story well, and had good-to-great effects and cutaways, we then showed it to the Mission leaders. There were a few changes totaling about two hours worth of editing and then we were done!

Step 9 : Output to DVD

After we got final approval we needed to encode and output the video to DVD, and also prepare it to stream on the web through our streaming server.

Step 10 : Send for Duplication

The last step in the process was to duplicate the DVD. In this case we duplicated 100 DVDs.