Working with Jolt is always a pleasure. We really enjoy the messaging and the empowerment the organization brings to young Latinos in Texas. Recently, they reached out to us to create some promotional material for their online conference, Texas Powerup Summit #TXPowerup. With only a couple of short weeks prior to the actual event, we had to get moving quickly.

Concept

Luckily, Jolt already had a concept for the promos in mind, so we weren’t bogged down with time trying to think of an interesting concept that would work for the promos. The idea was to simply interview current volunteers and past TPUS participants about their involvement with the organization and why they were excited to take part again this year. Our role was to take this open-ended idea and turn it into something both engaging and motivating… in the time span of about 30-45 seconds.

You may be quick to think that a very short-form piece of media might be easy to knock out. It’s only 30 seconds, that sounds simple. In actuality, the converse is true. Engaging and keeping your audience interested in such a short amount of time is extremely difficult, especially given social media platforms where the viewer can scroll away in a second. This is made more difficult with needing to provide actual messaging related to the event we’re trying to promote. Making a 1-2 minute video would be the easier choice. In 30 seconds, every single second is crucial, wherein in 2 minutes you may have some time to spare.

We decided to go ahead with a simple interview set up, but spruce it up a little with colored backdrops and some exposed production equipment. We didn’t want the videos to come off too polished but have a real and authentic feel to the interviews. The goal was to have the interviews be a little more raw and engaging.

Production

Jolt scheduled 3 volunteer interviews for a Saturday morning at their Dallas office location. We have filmed here a few times for various videos. While we didn’t want to reuse the same location and look yet again, the concept we had in mind would be different enough that it wouldn’t be immediately obvious the same location was used yet again. With some nice lighting and the seamless backdrop, we were able to get a different look and feel than what we’ve previously had at the Dallas Jolt office.

On camera interviews, such as this, are pretty straightforward in terms of setup and execution. We only needed about 1 hour to properly set up the cameras, backdrop, microphones, and lighting. We had everything about 95% of the way prior to our first interview showing up and were able to knock out the remaining 5% in just a few tweaks of the lights.

We shot the interviews on a 2 cameras setup. One camera was positioned right in front of the interviewee as our main angle, with another camera just to the right of the main camera to give us an option to cut-to in editing. This gives a lot more flexibility in post to craft the exact messaging we want while not making it obvious to the audience editing is being done. Additionally, both cameras shot in 4k. The final edit was to be exported in 1080p, so filming in 4k gives us a little bit of wiggle room to crop in on each angle in case we’d like to adjust the framing just a tad.

Each interview took about 45 minutes from start to finish and we captured some great insights from each interview as to why they love volunteering with Jolt, why they want to continue to be active in the community, and why they’d urge people in their community to get involved too.

Post-Production

Where the actual production day was fairly simple and straight-forward, the editing is where the real challenge lies. Now it was our job to take over 2 hrs of footage and trim it down to 3 thirty-second spots. The difficult part comes from needing to find a message that not only makes sense from a long interview but the words that communicate what we want the viewer to take from the promos.

The process of cutting each interview down is kinda simple… we have to watch and listen to each interview back again and start picking out pieces that we like. Once the first pass for each interview, we’ll usually have about 3-5 minutes of footage that we think fits what we need. We’ll continue to make passes at the selected footage, hopefully widdling it down to just a minute or so. This usually involved rearranging the clips in different fashions to see what makes sense and if we can make a unified message. Let’s say you have 5 clips you’d like to include, A B C D E. We’ll try different combinations of these clips to see what works best. “A C B E D” then “B A C D E”, maybe “E D B A C”… I think you get the idea.

Now that we’ve gotten each interview to a place that makes sense, we polish each piece with editing. Making sure each sentence flows, stutters are removed, and the audio has good pacing. Everything from this point on is polishing and making sure the video has a styled touch. We add music, fine-tune the color, and add any additional transitions or graphics to top it all off.

Release

Once we’ve created the finished video, we file transfer each spot to Jolt for their release strategy. This campaign involved releasing each video via their social media channels and engaging with their followers. Each day leading up to the conference, a new video was released and presented the importance of taking part in the Texas Powerup Summit.

We are super happy with how each video turned out and the reception each spot received. You would not be able to tell each video was done within a time-crunch and felt like it took weeks to produce. Please checkout each interview spot below and even a special graphics-heavy promo video we produced for the event as well.