Great idea: Gonzaga University and the twelve zag grads video

A few years ago, we used to think of content in terms of a blog post or a video but now we're trying to get as many different types of content out of the one story. We want a blog post, a long video and video snippets that we can share on social. We might also want quotes that we can share on social or add to our website and we want photography. We want the video to be shareable on Facebook and Twitter so we want it to be 30 seconds or less and we want to have subtitles so viewers can watch it without sound on the bus or ahem…in the library.

We understand better now how our audiences digest content so we know how to make it more attractive to them. Don't forget, we also want to get the biggest bang for our buck.

Advice for budding filmmakers

When we first started creating videos, we would write out one or two questions that we wanted to ask our subjects, grab our camera and shoot it a few times until we were happy. Now, we have a video strategy, we sit down and ask what do we want from this? What shots do we need? Can we repurpose this content? In short, we think of every single thing that we need before we ever contact anyone to appear in a video.

We were talking to a documentary maker recently who gave us some stellar advice. She said, “Great videos don't just happen. They're planned out to the smallest detail”. She told us that if she's shooting even just 30 seconds of footage, she creates a storyboard and a shooting script. 

Storyboarding will help you figure out exactly what shots you need before you ever arrive on “set”.

She also advised sending on this script to your subjects well ahead of time. This will give them ample time to prepare for filming.

Her last piece of advice was to build a library of sounds, images and video footage. That means the next time you want to shoot a piece with students, you can use footage from your extensive library!

https://www.gonzaga.edu/news-events/stories/2018/5/10/twelve-zag-grads-answer-10-questions 

We love this great video series from Gonzaga University. They asked 12 students from the class of 2018 about their time at Gonzaga. Each student was asked 10 questions which included questions like:

• What is the most important thing you've learned?
• How will you make an impact on the world?
• What advice would you give to incoming students?

https://twitter.com/GonzagaU/status/1000495554827350016 

For such a simple format, the university's social team have gotten a lot of value out of this series. They have created different formats for different social channels as well as accompanying imagery.

Let us know, how do you plan your video content? Do you storyboard or do you just wing it?