Reinforcing Company Culture Through Online Event Video
For any professional online video producer who is looking to jump into corporate work, producing corporate meeting highlights is a great way to start. Here Edit 1 Media's Chris Randall explains how producing videos for Aegis Living's annual corporate meetings has grown in complexity and profitability over the years.
How the Job Evolved
The first year we filmed the meeting, the goal was to provide a highlight of the week's events to show during the awards banquet. We also produced a video with some comic relief. The CEO wanted to go to a local mall and film a segment based on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno called "Jay Walking." We interviewed several people and asked them funny questions about Assisted Living. The Highlight and comedic video were a hit.
The following year proved to be more of a challenge. The company had planned to bring in some big-name speakers with an Oprah-style set. The CEO would interview the guest speakers to discuss their amazing stories on how they lived extraordinary lives by overcoming extreme adversity. The purpose of the theme was to give the Executive Directors the sense that things are pretty easy in this country and they shouldn't really take things for granted. In keeping with the theme, we also produced 3 short, funny videos that put some of the executive staff in "Extreme" situations. Our job, in addition to providing a highlight at the end of the week, was to film the speakers with a 2-camera setup. In addition, we would produce a library of the speakers that the Executive Directors could take back to their communities.
They started off the meeting with an Amazing Race-style team building exercise. Groups were given clues to locations around Seattle and each team had a small handheld video camera with them to document their travels. Two people on our crew followed two of the teams to get some action shots. All of this footage was edited into a short piece that was shown the following day.
Over the last few years, we have been privileged to have filmed some amazing people such as Dr. Wayne Dyer, Christopher Gardner (subject of the film The Pursuit of Happyness), Deepak Chopra, Jack Canfield, Deborah Norville, Naomi Judd, Patch Adams, Sarah Ferguson, Ted Kennedy Jr., Harry Belafonte, and Carlos Santana to name a few.
