BEYOND VIDEO SOLUTIONS: A VIDEO PRODUCTION WORKSHOP BY TEAM VCS

Workshop Highlight Video

Think about a video that made an impact on your life. This can be a Facebook video, an episode of a TV series, a TED talk, a documentary, or even a film. Think about what you saw and heard, and how it changed the way you see the world around you.

Video has the power to open your eyes to issues, make you change your behavior, and even share your new knowledge with others. And this is exactly why the Employers Confederation of the Philippines (ECOP), Federation of Free Workers (FFW), Danish Trade Union Development Agency (DTDA) and Vitalstrats Creative Solutions worked together to create videos that would help change the way that people think of corporate social responsibility programs or CSR.

Rethinking CSR

When you see the word “corporate social responsibility” (CSR), what comes to mind? Christmas parties for street children, gift-giving, tree-planting activities? While this is CSR, this isn’t all that CSR can be.

ECOP, FFW, and DTDA are currently working together to change how Filipino corporations think about CSR. They have come up with a campaign called Principles-Based, Inclusive, and Business-Sustainable CSR. This means that corporate social responsibility programs should:

1. Originate from guidelines and principles set by national authorities

2. Start with taking care of a company’s employees, before taking care of the community around them

3. Involve a company’s workers--from the inception of a program to its implementation

4. Help sustain the company

As of today, the Principles-Based, Inclusive, and Business-Sustainable CSR campaign has been implemented in several pilot enterprises. ECOP and its partners want more companies to learn about the importance of this project, which is why they tapped Team VCS to help them create campaign collaterals.

One of the materials for the CSR campaign is a case study video featuring all pilot enterprises. But in order to give a better picture of each enterprise’s experience with the CSR campaign, we needed to help them come up with their own video materials. Our solution? A video production workshop for representatives of the six pilot enterprises.

Behind the Scenes

We invited the managers, employees, and union leaders of each company to join the workshop. This would ensure an inclusive, unified, and more powerful storytelling in the case study video.

Team VCS envisioned this activity as an informative, empowering event for the pilot enterprise representatives. We planned to show them the basics of video production, train them to manage their own video shoots, and help them ensure the quality of footage to be used in the case study video.

To better prepare for the workshop, we sent a survey to the prospective attendees to get a better grasp on their video production knowledge and the kinds of equipment that they had. Finally, on October 29-30, Team VCS, ECOP, FFW, and representatives of the six pilot enterprises gathered in Crosswinds Tagaytay.

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Back to Basics: Video Production 101

Our Managing Partner / Chief Creative Officer, Amrei Dizon, served as the workshop’s lecturer / facilitator. She began the session by reminding the attendees about the objectives of the activity. They were tasked to be the storytellers of their companies, sharing their experiences in implementing the CSR campaign. Their creative output had an important purpose: to convince more enterprises to change the way they did CSR.

After this short introduction, it was time to delve into the technical side of video production. Attendees were introduced to the various roles in a video production team. Then, we showed them the various kinds of shooting equipment that they could use--from phone cameras to mirrorless cameras.

Attendees were introduced to the different types of lighting such as one-point, two-point, high key, low key, fill light, edge light, and natural light. They were also shown how different times of day could affect the lighting of a shot. As an exercise, we asked attendees to do a talking head shoot using high key and low key lighting.

For the segment on audio equipment, we taught them about directional and lapel microphones and gave pointers for ensuring proper audio recording. We emphasized that audio was just as important as video when it comes to storytelling.

Next, attendees were introduced to the 3 elements of exposure: shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Afterwards, the segment on framing taught attendees how to use the different kinds of shots to tell a story--from extreme close-ups to establishing shots.

The last topic for Day 1 was practical skills. These included camera movements like pan, whip, dolly, and others. Attendees weren’t just taught how to do these movements, but how to use them as methods for storytelling. They were also introduced to the concept of a shotlist, which would help them efficiently cover their creative ideas and prepare the logistics for a shoot.

The first day of the workshop showed us that the participants had done a bit of production work before, though they had not experienced as detailed a pre-production workflow as the one we discussed. They found this part especially helpful for their upcoming shoots.

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Leveling Up: A Simulation Video Shoot

Day 2 was all about applying the lessons from Day 1. First, the most valuable lessons were condensed into 10 best practices for video production. The group also reviewed the roles in a production team and basic film language.

Then came the exciting part: a mini-shoot with an evaluation. First, the attendees were divided into groups. Each group assigned their own director, cinematographer, actors, production manager, and production assistants. They brainstormed and pitched their story and created their own storyboards and shotlists. Finally, they were given time to shoot footage within the workshop vicinity.

Afterwards, the attendees were taught how to transfer and import their files properly--an important part in every video shoot. Using their simple editing software, attendees stitched their story together and added music to their footage.

All this--from pre-production to post-production took only 3-4 hours, but the results were undoubtedly impressive. We even held a short awards ceremony to recognize the workshop’s best actor and actress, as well as the groups with the best cinematography, best editing, and best picture.

To end the workshop, a Q&A session was held in order to prepare the attendees for their upcoming video shoots.

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Training Future Content Creators

The activity was a success, not just for ECOP, FFW, DTDA, and Team VCS, but for the attendees. Based on our post-mortem survey, the attendees found the workshop to be informative, engaging, and inspiring. In fact, a lot of them wanted longer practice sessions, and expressed interest in learning related skills like photo and video editing! Most importantly, the workshop gave them confidence in the video skills that they would use for their upcoming shoots.

Team VCS is honored and grateful for this chance to share our video skills with people of various industries. We would like to thank our partners, Mr. Julius Cainglet, Mr. Alvin Naboya, and Mr. Jose Roland Moya, for allowing us to share our skills with their team and the representatives of Globe Telecom, Two-Six Metals, Vishay, Allied Metals, Continental TEMIC, and Interphil Laboratories.

It is inspiring not only to be part of a meaningful campaign, but to help others awaken their inner content creators and storytellers. Just as the attendees looked forward to the next chance to learn more about content creation, we are excited for more opportunities to share our passion.

Interested in attending a workshop about video production, graphic design, digital marketing, content marketing, or even entrepreneurship? Send us a shoutout at hello@vitalstrats.net and let’s work together!