Suddenly, It Hit Us

On Monday, December 5, my colleague and I realized that the Holidays were right around the corner.

Yup. This meant we had a whopping 19 days to come up with Xmas video ideas for the two products we work for.

This calls for a bit of context… In 5 points!

- I work as an in-house video producer for a Montreal based tech company called GSOFT.

- My team is comprised of a talented videographer/photographer and myself.

- GSOFT works on several fronts, among which are their two major products, Officevibe and Sharegate.

- We do video all year long, for about 10 different teams, with a production backlog longer than my arm.

- We JUST got back from our 4-day office holiday party in the Bahamas, and had close to half a Tb of footage/pictures to sort through to quickly publish recaps while it’s hot.

In this kind of situation, it’s pretty easy to forget about such a minor event like, say, the FREAKIN’ HOLIDAYS..!

Ok now. Everything is gonna be just fine! Breathe in, breathe out. Let’s do this!

How Much Time Do We Have Exactly?

Remember, we had 19 days before Christmas. Deduct 4 weekend days (because work/life balance is a major company core value), we’ve now got 15. And, for good measure, you’d want your holiday video out at least a week prior to the 24th, this means we’re down to 10 days to get approved edits. And, as I mentioned, we’re working on several other projects we can’t afford to put on ice. Let’s round this all up to a good 7 days to do everything from the scripts, storyboards, castings, props, actual shooting days, edits, and validations on several steps along the way.

Breathe in, breathe out.

We had two avenues at this point. Either we plan each project the best we can separately, with a risk of botching the whole thing, or we could look at it as one large rush project and plan it all together to create the best value we can.

First order of business: we need a Santa, and he better be credible. Casting a bilingual, credible Santa (oh yeah, forgot to mention that we had to do both French and English versions of the videos) in December, that should be easy and cheap, right? It wasn’t.

Thankfully, we found the Santa Claus Association of the Province of Quebec. By the end of Monday the 5th, we managed to book an actor for Friday the 9th. We’ll obviously pay the high season price, and he’ll need his script by Wednesday to learn his lines.

Far from a script, we didn’t have any concepts yet.

The “Easy” Part

The first product, Sharegate, was rather easy. The brand has a signature funny videos series running for 3 years now. We only had to find a holiday-themed episode. With a format of roughly 30” with little to no script, this wouldn’t take too long in production time. We pitched a few ideas to their marketing team, they picked one, we detailed it, and were good to go.

Building From Scratch

As for Officevibe, this was a tad more complicated. We didn’t have any pre-existing media or video signature for the company. This meant we COULD make pretty much everything up, but also HAD to make everything up. Officevibe, being an employee engagement platform, and since we had a Santa, we figured we’d create a real client testimonial for a fake company: Santa’s tech workshop.

We wanted a startup vibe to it, so we called it Merryfy. If we had more time, we would have bought the domain name and staged a fake home page linking to the Officevibe site. We had to make do with a (great) logo.

Actually, the startup/tech company vibe came more from the lack of time to go location scouting than an executive decision. We quickly figured that we’d have to shoot everything in-house. And since we’re a tech company…again, tweaking the project to get the most out of what resources you’ve got.

Thus, Merryfy was born.

In-house Casting

We try to cast company employees as much as possible in our videos. This is a way to show the humans behind the product to our audience, and it’s the first time on camera for some, so it’s a pretty fun experience, far from their day-to-day tasks. And it’s much, much cheaper and less time-consuming than casting actors for every speaking part, even if it takes a bit longer to get usable takes.

For our Merryfy video, we needed two colleague-actors for each version, which we found rather easily. (Remember? We’re doing both an English and French version.)

What’s Production Value Anyway?

Have I mentioned the tightness of our budget yet? I don’t think I did, but by now you should have a good idea of where it’s at. Pretty much everything (95%) went on the highly demanded Santa actor. The upside is that we’re all geared up, from a C100, a 5D to several lenses, microphones, lights, etc. We have it covered.

Again, no locations or sets. Roughly six hours of Santa time. But this also meant no makeup artist. We decided to get prosthetic elf ears from a cosplay shop downtown to outfit everyone on screen except for Santa. We’ve never worked with prosthetics before so this should be fun! Add some gift wrapping paper to make a few props, and this was it!

We managed to send the approved scripts to Santa 36 hours prior to the shoot as requested. Although he would pretty much learn his lines on set… And did you know that you need far more than just the prosthetics to get seamless look? We learned it the hard way… So rather than trying to hide it, we decided to have them in plain sight so they’d be extra noticed. The shoot went splendidly regardless.

Finishing Up

We’re stoked and waiting for approval of our edits, right when Typeform publishes their Holiday video…

It has:

- The same “Santa as a client” concept that we have with Merryfy.

- Far (!!) more production value.

- They published it earlier than us.

- They hired the SAME freaking Santa actor!

We get tons of Slack notifications about the Typeform video while trying to finish and upload ours ASAP. We got everything online just in time! We got great engagement and responses on them, so mission accomplished, and we’re pretty damn satisfied with the end result!