5 Tool Productions is no stranger to making videos with alumni or potential donors in mind as the target audience. The fun part is thinking of creative ways to grab that audience’s attention and hopefully make them think about giving back to that university or organization. We put our creative hats on for this project we worked on with our friends over at Boston University for their “Donors Open Doors” donor campaign.
This project all started when the team at BU came to us with a shot they had really liked from an advertisement for Uber that included a montage of passengers exiting the car using a unique looking dolly shot over and over again. So the 5 Tool team put their heads together and decided to replicate that shot using students walking through various doors around BU’s campus. On top of that, we wanted to use the theme of doors throughout the video and decided to bookend the video with a montage of different types of doors around BU and the city.
On site, one team was tasked with venturing around BU’s entire Boston campus to capture still photos of any cool looking or iconic door they could find. A second team went from location to location using the dolly rig to film BU students walking through recognizable doors. Broll was then captured of students interacting with each space going off a specific shot list the 5 Tool team had created in planning and scripting this video.
Post production was a fun process due to the many options of different door pictures, dolly shots, and the large amount of broll that was captured for this video. When creating a donor campaign video that is only supposed to be about a minute long, the editor has some creative freedom to really sift through and choose the best broll that was captured on site.
We decided to add some movement in the beginning door montage to really grab that viewers attention within the first 5-10 seconds. If done correctly, this will hold their attention all the way until the call to action at the end.
This turned out to be a really great project and was a real team effort from start to finish. We were able to get a bit creative with how we shot this video and got to use some new techniques and equipment in the process!