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The Vassar team reached out to us to produce several videos that could be sent out to their alumni base to spread awareness about their loyalty society. They wanted to achieve two goals – steward existing donors, and remind past donors to renew. by creating one overall video that could act as a thank you to those who were already members, and also as a call to action for those who may want to be a part of the society.
Through a few informative calls with their team, we identified what kind of videos they wanted to make, the big themes and bullet points they wanted to hit, as well as the type of students they had in mind to be involved with said videos. The Vassar team made it clear that these videos had to “feel like Vassar” which gave us a distinct tone and feel for which to aim. We know how important brand identity is to higher education clients; we wanted to help Vassar identify what that looked like and how to achieve it through videos like these. After some workshopping and brainstorming, the team was able to give us a good direction to take the video, and our teams boiled down a script and storyboard to help us when shooting on location.
The loyalty video would consist of Vassar students sitting on a branded backdrop talking about loyalty and how it has made Vassar the school that it is today. Along with the scripted video, we were also tasked with creating individually-focused student videos to showcase how alumni gifts have helped these students achieve great things in their time at Vassar. Something really helpful we did for this project was to hold pre-interviews with the students that the Vassar team picked for the videos. These were short casual interviews to meet and get to know the students and hear about their time and experiences at Vassar. This was a huge help in setting us up for the live interviews we would be conducting while on campus for filming. From the pre-interviews we were able to create a one sheet for each student with a list of questions and specific locations around campus that we could capture the students at for powerful supporting footage.
The 5 Tool team traveled to Poughkeepsie, NY to visit the beautiful Vassar campus for two days of filming. We were able to get on campus a day early to walk around and scope out the locations we had picked out for each student and plan some potential shots that we thought would look good throughout the videos. We were excited to get to work so the next day we met up with the Vassar team, converted a classroom into our impromptu set and met our first interview subject.
Each student would come on set where we would capture them interacting with a prop typewriter to capture that crisp natural typing sound and broll of them typing to use at the beginning of the loyalty video. We would then transition into the read and repeat section of filming where the students would read a script of a prompter direct to camera. After this, we shifted the look of the set a bit to sit down for more conversational interviews for the solo stories using the topics and questions we came up with in pre-production.
Once the on-set portion of filming was complete, we split up the 5TP members into teams – one for b-roll and one to continue interviews. Our teams switched off from student to student and in total we were able to successfully film interviews and broll with all five students over the course of two days.
Once we were back home at the 5 Tool headquarters, we were able to comb through the students’ recordings and pick the best takes from each. We used these to chop together one overarching loyalty video and two solo student videos to deliver a mini-suite of videos that Vassar could use in their upcoming loyalty campaign.
Check out some of our favorite shots from around Vassar’s beautiful campus
