As much as we all love the approach into the festive season, it is always a sad time when summer ends, so let’s hold onto that summer feeling for a little bit longer and have a look at what we got up to over a busy, productive and exciting period at Croft TV.
Let’s begin our recap with a project which saw us travelling to Cambridge to shoot a Q&A style video with arguably one of the most important fields of work happening in the world today – data security.
From the shoot, the company will receive one long form video and, as 11 questions were answered in the video, they will be cut down into 11 individual social snippets.
That’s a great example of how to make the most out of the money you invest in a shoot!
Speaking of bang for your buck… we’ve completed a number of projects that involve updating older videos this summer for brands that have upgraded products, changed ranges and even some that have gone through a complete re-brand.
Like we’ve said in the past, just because something changes does not mean you automatically need to make a whole new video, and it is one of the reasons we keep such a long archive of previous projects, so we can easily go back to them for clients.
To be specific, some of the more recent updates we’ve made to older videos have included changing things like logos, brand colours, product specs, music and much more, making the video feel brand new.
A lot of the videos were then translated into subtitled versions for languages such as French, German, Italian and Spanish – another great way to make that investment go further!
During the COVID lockdowns, our industry saw a large rise in self-shot video content, which we would be employed to edit, add animations, music and basically polish up, making it look as good as it can.
This summer however, had a pre-lockdown feeling to the number of shoots we were filming live and the number of shoots currently in the planning stages.
A couple of really interesting projects we filmed over the summer months were for the same client and involved technology that most of us see often in our everyday lives, even if we don’t realise it… live broadcast technology.
For people who are unaware of the technology that goes into live TV, just have a watch of the news, a football game or Strictly Come Dancing, and think about how everything you see is happening live, from the camera changes to statistical overlays and even effects – it is astonishing what is possible on the fly!
The first project was a 2 day shoot which detailed the technology and how it worked, all led by an industry expert.
Out of which, 12 individual videos were shot… again great bang for your buck!
We love shoots like this not just because the client made the most from their investment which we always like to see, but also as the topic is so close to what we do, we are very interested to hear and learn the latest in that particular niche of the industry.
The client was extremely happy with what we had shot and had us back the very next week for another 3 days to shoot a number of videos on portable broadcast technology, and we have another project with them coming very soon!
They even left us this lovely message…
“Thanks again for smashing it for us.”
Another project that involves live shooting that stands out is currently in the works for one of our oldest blue-chip clients and has a very important message about climate change.
There is a couple of reasons we wanted to mention this project, the first is because we love seeing our clients push such important subject matter…
…and the second is the timings and deadline that we are working to.
The video is made up of stock footage that we have sourced as well as some that was provided to us and involves 2 live shoots, the second of which is occurring just 3 days before the client needs the entire video.
We pride ourselves on this type of turnaround!
So rather than editing everything at once, this video will happen in stages so that by the time the last shoot happens, we can just slot it in to what we’ve edited so far.
If the client needs a fast turnaround, we’ll do everything in our power to provide it!
Outside of the live shoots we still did have all of our usual self-shot videos to edit and finesse, but to ensure this blog article doesn’t end up a 20 minute read, let’s leave it there!
We hope you all had a lovely, sunny and productive summer… bring on the cosy seasons!
