This year, several institutions have chosen to produce special videos to welcome freshmen on campus.
I’ve already written about “It’s Your Turn” from Missouri S&T, but today I’d like to share the video from Imperial College London in the UK.
At 3 minutes and 36 seconds, this video does a great job at presenting the institution, its history (that part actually is reminiscent of Missouri S&T video’s treatment), its academic programs, facilities and even main research projects.
So, just take the time to watch it, it’s really worth it.
This video was created and produced by Pamela Agar’s team at Imperial College. Pamela and her team members answered the following questions to give you a behind-the-scenes look.
1) What are the goal and target audience of this video? Why did you choose a video to reach this target audience?
At the start of each academic year, all new students attend presentations on their first day where senior staff and student representatives welcome them to Imperial and introduce the College. The staff involved in these presentations felt that they could be more fun and engaging, and so we were asked to produce a short film to open the presentations in an informative but unusual way.
We didn’t need to “sell†Imperial’s facilities to this audience of Freshers (Karine’s note: freshmen as we would say in the US) – they’ve already made the decision to come. So the film was much more about instilling a feeling of pride in our new students. We wanted to grab their attention and make them feel excited about the institution they are now part of. The scope of the film was vast – we were asked to try and cover the College’s history, past and present achievements and what new students can expect – all in less than four minutes! But using video and animation meant we could cover a lot visually as well as using the script.
2) How long did it take you to produce the video from start to finish? Can you describe a bit what kind of effort went into it?
From start to finish, we produced this in 2 weeks. After several initial brainstorms about how to approach the project, it took a couple of days to write and rewrite the script until it was short enough, without losing the desired content and messages. We also spent a day lining up the locations on campus, writing up the filming schedule and ensuring we had three students to star in the films – we used students in the College’s drama society. The film shoot itself took 1 day, and the video production team of two spent 3-4 days in post production. Our web designer developed the intro and in-video gfx and sound over 5-6 days.
In all, five people worked on the project – although not full time over the two weeks.
3) What tools (software, camera, etc.) did you use to create this video?
For the film elements, we used a Sony DVCAM and edited using Media100. Our web designer produced the graphics in Photoshop and Illustrator. The animations were programmed in Flash, exported as mov with embedded alpha channel. The “large” animation of the zooming map was done in After Effects. Sounds were then edited in WaveLab. All elements were assembled in Premiere and exported as one large mov.
4) Any interesting lessons learned in this project you’d like to share with the community?
I asked around the team about this question and one thing they said was that they found that Flash is a great tool for programming animations. The code can be easily re-used for any kind of object which in turn speeds up the production process when having to create loads of animations that follow the same pattern. And a technical thing they reported was that exporting from Flash with embedded alpha channel only works if the file format is QuickTime.
On a more general level, my (very obvious) lesson is don’t leave things to the last minute! We had a very busy summer producing a number of other projects, so left producing this Start of Session video until just a couple of weeks before the deadline. Leaving it until during the Summer vacation also meant it was harder to find students to star in the film as most were away from campus – we were very lucky we managed to find a great trio.
We didn’t leave much contingency time in case things went wrong, and so when our web designer came down with flu just as he was about to start work on the graphics almost ruined the project. Thankfully he managed to complete the project from his sick bed – that’s dedication!
