We’re back to talk to all about our latest video production and post production work after a week’s break from weekly blogging. As a result, we’ll be going over the last couple of weeks of video work, including everything we’ve been filming, everything we’ve been editing and delivering on the post production side of things and, as always, what video work we’ve been sharing with the world across our social media channels.
So, let’s take a look…
In case you missed it, the reason we took a break from the weekly blog service last week was to cover a more detailed case study of some of our corporate video work. This case study was relating to a long form, high end learning video series that we’ve been creating for our client, Oliver James, over the last 18 months.
We’ve really enjoyed helping them to create the flagship video content that sits at the heart of the brand new, bespoke learning platform that’s been rolled out to all members of the workforce. It’s been a fantastic and engrossing project to be a part of; one that’s allowed us to flex our creative muscle in the corporate video space and sharpen our production tools when it comes to creating engaging, educational content. Overall, it’s allowed us to showcase just how creative corporate video can be.
For our case study, we took a deep dive into the video production process, from the very start to the very end. We covered everything from the initial client brief through to the pitch, the actual video production and the shoot days through to all of the post production work - the editing, visual effects, colour grading and sound mixing.
So if you’ve ever been interested in charting a video project through all of the various stages, from conception to delivery, then this is definitely worth a read! A lot of the time when it comes to corporate video production, there’s uncertainty amongst clients about exactly what they’re looking for or how to achieve the best video results for their company. We’re hoping that with case studies like this, we can offer a little bit of guidance on how a long form and creative video production comes together, so that it might assist companies in the future when it comes to commissioning corporate video work. There’s also plenty of guidance in there for videographers and tons of filmmaking and video tips and tricks - so if you’re creating videos in the corporate video space, then hopefully it offers some inspiration.
Take a look at the case study and if it gets your creative juices flowing about some creative corporate video production, then why not take a look at what else we can offer?
Sticking with corporate video production (and Oliver James), we were in their Manchester head office last week to create some video content for International Women’s Day 2024.
This was an internal corporate video to celebrate the achievements of women in their work force and discuss how the company is working towards equality and equity as a business, in line with the goals and suggestions of International Women’s Day 2024.
Primarily a talking head video, we approached this in the same way we do a lot of corporate video productions: with an emphasis on scripting. As we’ve talked about in the past, the majority of corporate video work is about delivering a key message to an internal or external audience, or sometimes both. Because these videos are all about messaging, it’s usually imperative that the words spoken on screen are accurate and in keeping with the branding and ethos of the company. That’s why it’s always a good idea to have a script and to stick to it.
Sometimes the thought of scripting a video can be really daunting for a corporate company, especially if they aren’t used to creating their own video content internally from scratch. That’s why we offer a variety of script services as part of our corporate video production service, ranging from script polishing right through to writing full scripts from a framework of ideas and themes. So, when it comes to an important topic like International Women’s Day, a script is more important than ever. Whether it’s discussing statistics or using carefully chosen language to convey the complexities of balancing gender issues in a corporate workforce, having it written down and agreed to by all staff members involved adds an element of safety to a corporate video production. Everyone knows what’s going to be said and why, and no one is left in front of a camera, panicking on the spot about how to say something correctly.
The actual video production itself was relatively simple. As we do with all of our scripted corporate video work, we based this shoot around a main angle that utilises our autocue/teleprompter. This allowed all of the speakers to read from the script, whilst maintaining perfect eye contact with the camera lens and therefore, their audience. Once again, everything is kept on brand and within the boundaries of the corporate message and there is minimal impact on people’s business days, as their shoots are more efficient. This is an absolute corporate video trick of the trade and something we can’t imagine ourselves producing videos without.
We shot everything in the open office environment so that the final video maintained a connection to the workforce as a whole. Plus, the office provided great depth and natural production value. We’re currently working on the post production side of things to deliver the video for this week’s upcoming IWD 2024, so expect a deep dive on that in next week’s blog.
In our Manchester post production hub, we’ve been working on a lot! We’ll take a specific look at two projects that were quite interesting…
We’ve been working on a corporate video series for the NHS for the last six weeks. This is primarily a talking head series that deals with helping the parents of children with relapsed or refractory neuroblastoma to develop a greater understanding of some of the terminology and processes that will be involved with treatment.
It’s been a fascinating and humbling video project to be part of. It’s offered unique challenges to create content that needs to be factual yet approachable, video content that provides both enough information without alienating its audience and offers a compassionate approach to the subject, all whilst still being aesthetically smart.
We concluded the shoots a few weeks ago and we discussed how we’d been working on the branding and graphics side of this content in our last weekly blog update. These last few weeks, we’ve been working on pulling all of the editing together to create a total of 13 videos and working on the offline editing, online editing, sound mixing and colour grading, as well as managing the full content delivery process of feedback and sign off. It’s been a super involved process, but we’ve created a suite of videos that deliver on all of the complex aims of the project and they’ve received excellent feedback from user testing!
Elsewhere in post production, specifically visual effects work, we’ve been retouching an older video for one of our property clients. Often visual effects work is thought of as creating huge, otherworldly spectacles from green screen shoots, but there are a lot of smaller, more practical applications for subtle visual effects work.
In this particular instance, we had a client who had rebranded. They had an older video that they wanted to reuse, rather than reshoot, but it contained their old branding. Our job was to remove the old branding without losing the content of the video. In other words, we couldn’t just cut out this portion of the video that contained the logo, we had to remove the logo from the shots.
This is a great example of how we can help to elevate a video product for a brand with visual effects work. It’s also a great example of how you might not realise what’s possible with visual effects or how visual effects post production work can help with your video production. In both cases, we’re always here to discuss ways in which we can help with your video project.
On our social channels, we’ve been up to all kinds! For a start, we celebrated St David’s Day for the 1/6th portion of Cosmic Joke that’s Welsh. See if you can figure out how that works…We also had a video recap of our February, which showed off our busy month and all the video production (and eating) that we got up to. It’s fun to create these more social media focussed videos that lean into the style of Instagram reels and TikTok videos. It’s a great way to share what we’ve been up to and to give a little bit of an insight into the behind the scenes of our filmmaking, whilst breaking down some of the walls between us and our clients and audiences.
We shared our new showreel that’s specifically showcasing our gig videography or live music filming. We already had some content that focussed on our live event filming in general, but we felt like it was time to take a deeper dive into the live music video work that we’ve done over the last five plus years. We’ve talked a lot about how much we love shooting live music and filming gigs on this blog, so we’ll let the visuals do the talking for once.
In the coming week, we’ll be heading down to London for more commercial video work for The Cauldron. This time we’ll be helping to create the video content for their social media marketing for the next few months, starting with some St Patrick’s Day celebrations. Being huge fans of this particular holiday, and its drinking connotations, we can’t wait! In our Manchester post production house, we’ll be working on the edit and visual effects for the International Women’s Day promo that we shot, along with celebrating International Women’s Day ourselves. See you then!
If you’ve stumbled upon this post by accident, or like what you’ve read and want to know more about us, then we’re Cosmic Joke, a film and video production company based in Manchester. We specialise in music videos, live event filming, commercials and bespoke branded visuals. We create engaging short form and feature length film content that has screened around the world and you can learn more about everything we do here.