Overnight edits for a year

For the past year, I’ve been flying to Boston to make videos overnight.

And when I say overnight, I mean overnight.

And when I say videos… I mean anywhere between 10 and 20 videos OVERNIGHT.

As part of a large team-building exercise, teams were tasked with creating short 60–90–second films based around the ideas and messaging they learned over the course of the program. The videos are a way to reinforce the strategic messaging through the power of storytelling. What better way to remember these points than by turning them into stories? 

The films were fun. Sometimes weird. Sometimes surprisingly good and maybe… unsurprisingly bad in some cases. But the finished videos weren’t really the point. Making them was.

Teams had to take an idea, figure out how to communicate it, assign roles, get in front of a camera, and create something together. Video became a way to reinforce what they’d been learning without it feeling like another presentation.

Our job was to make sure the creative chaos actually turned into finished films. And we only had until the next morning.

Before we even get to the videos, we have to back up to the request from the client. “Can you not only build user friendly, production ready camera kits that could be handed off to teams, support them while they were shooting, collect and organize the footage, and then lead post-production?”

Once the cameras and production kits were sorted, we turned to the first hurdle on the post-production side…how do we staff an overnight edit room for 20 videos a night? We put up the bat-signal and started interviewing local editors. Our team being based in Atlanta, it made the most sense to hire as much local talent as possible so we could travel with a small crew and still cover all bases.

We broke it down into a few needs; first the editor, next was motion graphics support. (Did I mention these overnight videos also included graphic overlays, title cards, and in several instances full-on visual effects.) Fully staffed for our overnight edits we had 20 editors, 5 motion graphics artists and a producer to run the room. 

We thought this was going to be the hardest part… finding the crew, putting together the camera kits, establishing our workflow. But what I was most surprised about was managing a room full of 25 creatives who all have their own ideas, their own workflows, and communication styles. What started in my mind as a logistics challenge turned very quickly into a people challenge. Not to say any of the talented editors or artists were challenging; more so, 25 unique voices, approaches, and creatives all working individually, but still needing to meet not only quality standards but brand standards, was something I just hadn’t fully wrapped my head around until our first overnight edit. 

Over the course of the last year, this process really bore itself out. It was such a learning experience for me to learn how to work with so many creatives. I wish I could have walked away with an easy answer or an easy solution. The truth is, working with other creatives is the favorite part of my job… but it can also be the most difficult part of the job. 

Oddly enough, this was the one job where the client was the EASY part.