Industry Perspectives: Strategies for Successful Video Collaboration

[Editor's Note: Industry Perspectives is a regular feature in which vendors in the streaming media space explore issues and trends on which they can shed unique perspective. The articles reflect the opinions of the authors only, and we print them as a means of starting discussion.]

All kinds of corporate and organizational communications—for marketing, sales, partnerships, recruiting, training, support, operational management, investor relations, issue advocacy, and other areas—have benefited in recent years from a couple of areas of technological advancement. One is availability of better online collaborative tools and another is much more accessible digital video production. Yet, these trends are largely divorced from each other and have yet to substantially benefit the same projects.

I have spent much of my career in marketing and I am highly appreciative of better project work with teammates and vendors in such experiences as the following:
• Approaching tradeshows and events consistently by jointly agreeing to the key questions that tend to require answers and key issues that get addressed, and handling through a briefing document form that the team becomes accustomed to filling and referencing every time.
• Having web development vendors develop password-accessed sites for us to log in, view, and comment about stages of work from conceptual mock-ups through final approval of what’s to be delivered all within a browser with no need for downloading content or applications.
• Exchanging press release drafts with public relations firms in documents set with track changes capabilities so that everyone knows exactly who suggested which edits and when, with motivations for such edits often explained in brackets right next to the edit itself.

A few years ago I started to find myself involved more frequently in production of video, but often frustrated by the stark contrast in efficiency and communications to the benefits cited above.

We would select and start working with production professionals, and our relative areas of expertise and ignorance became apparent very quickly. We were the experts in subject matter and objectives for the particular project, and the producer and crew were experts in the craft and technical media considerations of making video. Each of us had little perspective on the other’s areas and in the course of a few weeks or at most couple of months for a project there would be no time to close that gap.

So, we each tried to take on complete responsibility for those areas of production for which we were naturally responsible, without communicating to or coordinating with the other about those areas.

As the subject matter experts, my colleagues and I on the client side would decide who would appear on camera and what would be said according to a script we developed. The producer would leverage a brief conversation with us to determine what kind of shoot would occur and line up crew and facilities accordingly.

Then we would all show up on the set and finally begin exchanging our perspectives. Often we would discover that our script was too long for the kind of video we sought, so we would assemble in a corner hacking away at it while a paid crew waited idly. And the producer and director would often learn that their understanding of what was to be shot was lacking due to insufficient exchanges with us and no story-boarding exercise at all, so they would be frantically shuttling crew and equipment and rearranging the set.

Production would often start late while we scrambled with these necessary on-site adjustments. Then it would get even more chaotic because company employees having to appear on camera would show up late, unpracticed in what would be said on camera, and distracted by important calls and emails. Shooting video remains an exotic undertaking for many of us and it is important to understand the right pace and tone of speaking as well as physical delivery style for being on camera – difficult training to provide under such hectic circumstances.

Production days always ran late by hours, which was expensive at the overtime rates of crew, facilities and equipment. Even worse, an extra day of shooting would sometimes have to be scheduled.

Things did not operate any smoother once the shoot was done. There were days or even weeks during which the ongoing work to footage by producer, editor and crew was a black box to us on the client side. Once they were ready with content to share, the files were so big that email, our normal method of organizational exchange, was an impractical option. So we would have to get content by rarely used and highly esoteric FTP transfers, or even take physical delivery of DVDs with the content.

Contrasting normal work modes of scanning one’s inbox to determine what work to address means that internal project managers find themselves having to constantly harass participants to perform their reviews of video footage. Once people access the footage is accessed for review, they often discover that there’s no guidance on how to provide feedback.

Almost everyone provides footage reviews by email, but that’s where the consistency ends. Some write to the internal project manager, some to the most senior team member, some to the outside producer and some to the whole group. When getting content some reply-all, some reply to the sender, some just forward to one of the individuals referenced above.