Each year, my newspaper puts together a tab highlighting members of Hays Area Young Professionals, a chamber of commerce group for younger business people. This year, I proposed to my manager that we try producing video profiles to go along with the tab. We offered these as an upsell for print ads. Two of the business went for it.

I did have a lot of fun with this project. Ashley, one of our ad reps assisted me — she scheduled the times and asked the questions, and even drove to the appointments, so of course I included her in the credits. My co-worker and I were swamped with three big projects (four, if you count these videos) that were due all about the same time, so her assistance was invaluable.

We actually produced a sample video with Ashley (she was in the publication last year) so the ad reps could have something to show their clients. I actually shot that with my iPad, so the quality, especially the audio, isn’t the best, but it demonstrated what we could do. For the sponsored videos, I used the paper’s Canon video camera.

I used iMovie to edit the videos. I’ve used Adobe Premiere for a cooking show we produced, but that’s been a few years ago, and I wanted to make sure I could get these done quickly. Apple’s iMovie was perfect for that, and I actually learned a lot about how to do different things, like cutaways, that I hadn’t really even done with Premiere.

The only thing I wish I had done different was to get some B-roll footage for more cutaways. I did do that with the sample video, but that was with a co-worker and we scheduled it when she had plenty of time. These were people whose work time we were taking. Maybe next time we can schedule a little extra time and arrange with them to get the B-roll.

It was a good learning experience, and I hope it leads to more video projects for our advertising department.