Yes, why the focus on corporate video? I’ve been shooting videos for companies for many years but have never really much thought about it until very recently.
I was at a meeting with a client the other day, when he asked me an interesting question – why is Q2 Digital Studio focused on producing corporate/industrial videos? Thats when I realized that I was never interested in shooting anything else.
I guess the answer is because behind every shot we take in a factory, office, or site, is a story of the people who have put blood and sweat into making that shot possible. These are real work places, often quite messy and busy, so they are hardly the nicest things to show on video. But in the minds of our clients, these places are their pride and joy, and are absolutely beautiful. So for this complex reason, I feel that our job is to honor the effort that went into these places by going the extra mile and taking the best shots possible so that these places appear on video as beautiful as they are in the minds of our clients.
One example of this is a shot of a client’s building that my daughter Coco was cleaning up in Photoshop one day. The building was built almost 50 years ago, and today was in need of a major paint job. The client was never satisfied with the retouched image until Coco had almost completely redone the buildings’ facade, doing a digital paint job on it, cleaning all the windows, and taking out the telephone wires that had been installed over the past few decades. There was no way the building looked like that today, but it was what the client saw in their mind’s eye of how the building used to look like way back when they built it.
On another day I was doing a location shoot in an apparel factory in Panyu, China, shooting some dresses that merchandisers had prepared for a video we were making. One of the department heads started talking about one dress, and why she had to place it in front so that the video we were shooting could feature it. She said that this dress was special, and that she spent a lot of time on it until the buyer accepted it. She told us about the material and the extra care she took to make the pattern.
I made a comment that it must be a premium item then, priced to reflect the cost of fabric and effort. She told me that none of their buyers ever pay a good price for their dresses. Never, she stressed, and this is for a large retailer, mind you. But she worked so hard on this dress so we should feature it up front.
I got it – this dress is special. And in fact all the dresses they make there are special, each with their own stories. For this reason I went the extra mile and shot those dresses so that they were as beautiful in the video as they were in the minds of the client.
So clients ask me – why do we shoot corporate and industrial stuff exclusively? Maybe its the stories behind the shots that mean something to us at Q2 Digital Studio. We feel that its our job to honor the unseen folk with our camera work. Or we see a strange beauty in warehouses, factories, and machines – a beauty that reflects the effort of dozens of company people.
Compared to other types of shooting, i guess nothing else brings the same fulfilment. Thats probably why clients keep hiring us year after year.
By the way, if your company or organization could use a corporate video (corporate AVP as some call it), please keep us in mind. We feel that we do corporate AVPs better than most. You can learn more about our company here, and more about the unique way we do things here.
