Sarah,

 

It was a pleasure sitting down with your team. Thanks for considering us for this project. We really enjoy working with you. I loved my college experience and getting to help tell the different stories of Samford takes me back. With that, here are my thoughts on the piece that we’re trying to create:
 

I watched the current video. It feels like a video tour of the space and says some great things about what the College of Health Sciences offers. If you’re looking for us to do an updated version of that, then we could pull it off for your current budget of $7k-8k. It would be tough to impossible to hit all 15ish spaces. Just to clarify so that we are on the same page, we’d shoot for a day with slim crew and not really have enough time to light the spaces or put many people in them (so that we can move quickly). This piece would honestly be an updated version of what you currently use and would need to rely heavily upon text on screen to help give information. It would be pretty but I don’t think it would differ to much from what you have.

 

My question: What is this Video? Is this a tour video? Is this a recruitment tool? If it’s a recruitment tool, then we should make the viewer (potential students & parents) FEEL something.

 

What I think the current video lacks is a heartbeat. The space needs to feel alive. There’s an energy to learning. A passing of fire from one generation to the next to keep mankind moving forward. It’s not a place where knowledge is dispensed into mere facts and figures but a place where knowledge can live and breathe. A place where you can put your hands on it and see what it can do. The best way to describe the College of Health Sciences is the perfect intersection of function and passion. You get real experience with tools that really help people. You get professors who care about you succeeding in helping the world become a better place. This is what higher learning is all about. This place is what institutional learning was established for. This place is a vision. A mecca. An agora. And when a student comes here, to your school they feel something. They feel empowered that they will walk into a hurting world prepared to fix it.

 

Belief. Design. Students.

 

I think the video needs to be about what you believe about learning and how that has influenced the design of the space. And those two things together positions you (the student) to succeed. This video is more about a system or approach to learning as it is about what the space looks like. I think we can make the spaces look beautiful because for the most part, they are already cool. But to give it life? We need people and a message. A message that resonates with a feeling of empowerment.

 

I would use a voice over that carefully and beautifully articulates the mission of the College of Health Sciences. Then we pick the 8 most interesting places to showcase that approach and design to learning. Students interacting with all the state of art training tools, interacting with professors, or cooking in the kitchen. We light every scene. We film it more of a handheld style at slow frame rate (similar to the pharmacy piece, see below) to make it feel faster and more alive. And to make it evergreen, we stay inside. We focus on what happens in the classroom. The voiceover and the music is what drives the video. This idea is more expensive. But I think it gives you more of what you want. I would ballpark this one at $16-20k. Which I understand is outside your original budget. But to pull it off well and at a high production value, this is where we’ll probably have to live.

 

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to Audra. I’m leaving for Africa Saturday and will be gone until December 9th.

 

Thanks,

Ryan Whaley