I was tasked during my internship at Trinity University's Strategic Communications and Marketing department to create a set of 6 interviews for 6 people that are declaring their majors. Initially, the plans were to make it rough around the edges and very trendy—instead It went in a direction that eventually got my university to look at marketing in a different way.
This project was a whirlwind.
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As a computer science major and sociology minor, my courses are somewhat important and difficult for me. This project did not aid in my degree at all, but my interest in video and my overall technical prowess allows me to do something of this caliber, which I really enjoyed.
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The whole process started with guessing around some marketing ideas. Much of the research that we picked told our team that social media appreciates genuine interviews that are rough around the edges and not too overproduced (something like instagram reels or TikTok 'for you' pages). However, I believed deep down that, considering Trinity University wants to "rise to the national stage of liberal arts schools," we need to show what we got—if we have students that will go the mile in their academia, why not go the extra mile in our production? It was a very selfish initiative that ended up paying off—over 400,000 interactions with this ad campaign throughout most paid media.
The Process
I was a one man show for most of this project (video editor, composer and producer), aside from a few writers and guiders. To make my job easier, I started out creating templates from scratch for motion graphics and created some music for a smaller amount of those videos.
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I got to write my own music for the intro of this interview as well as perform in it. You can also see the motion graphics used were my own, created from After Effects. The template created by me was less personalized and was included as the name text (title you see once the intro sequence is over). However, when things get more personalized, is when the motion graphics are heightened as we also see in this next example right at the very beginning (mainly to match the interviewee's personality).
Once the motion graphics were complete, editing would usually work in tandem with the writing of these interviews. We would take snippets from each interview, block out dialogue from the interview that show the stories directly and their philosophies for picking their major, as well as how it involves Trinity University.
This was the bulk of the work, but once you have the aesthetics and foundations right, you can easily work with the stories.
Tumbles & Conclusion
There are always going to be hurdles when completing large projects like these. For instance, I had issues balancing class time and work time; at one point I was the highest paid student worker at my school due to how many hours I was putting in (unfortunately, not good). This was a project that was near and dear to my heart, and I didn't want to let it go. So I became more weary when other people touched the project—something that was necessary—especially when working in a team for future projects. I learned ways to guide my coworkers along the process that I went through to ease the stress off me. Luckily the collaborations all worked out in the end, and we finished a very large campaign within 3 months of on-and-off work.