Recording Testimonials from the Comfort of Home

CoWorx and Axcess are two of the biggest staffing agencies in the United States. They provide jobs for thousands upon thousands of workers in call centers, warehouses, clerical offices, manufacturing plants, packaging facilities, and beyond.We were tasked with creating video content that would shine a light on some of the people whose lives were changed for the better by getting work through CoWorx or Axcess. In collaboration with the client, we developed a plan: we were going to travel a small crew to four locations — Bridgewater, NJ; Waterbury, CT; Atlanta, GA; and Indianapolis, IN — and interview multiple employees and contractors in each location. Then, we’d identify factories, warehouses, and offices to film in in each of those locations and capture footage of those people at work in those environments.We’d hear stories directly from the people who lived them, and create short-form documentaries from that footage: one person per video.The result would be a series of impactful, emotional testimonials for the brands.Just as we were getting ready to book our travel, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out across the United States. Travel plans and video productions were put on hold indefinitely.But we didn’t want to give up on creating high-quality testimonial content for CoWorx and Axcess.That’s where our remote production capabilities came in.

 

Remote Production Solutions

Emerging technologies — along with a little bit of ingenuity and trust — saved the video marketing campaign. We knew that many of the people whom we were going to be interviewing did not have 100% reliable Internet connections, so recording a regular video call to get the footage that we needed for the testimonial was out of the question.With that in mind, we decided to leverage a remote recording software platform called OpenReel to eliminate the risk of bad Internet ruining our recordings. OpenReel natively records synced video footage and audio directly on the user’s device and only uploads it into the Cloud once recording is finished. Therefore, no matter how good or bad an interviewee’s Internet connection was, we were guaranteed to have stable, synced, seamless footage at the end of the day.Armed with a reliable recording platform, the next thing that we had to solve for was equipment. How would we capture the best video and audio possible without mailing expensive, unwieldy camera and audio equipment to our interviewees? The answer was simple: iPhones and lavalier microphones.We wanted to shoot at the highest resolution possible, so we knew that we didn’t want to rely on laptop webcams. iPhones allowed us to shoot at 4K resolution, giving us the flexibility to reframe shots in post-production and have the best image quality possible.We packaged up iPhones (with the OpenReel app loaded on to the home screen), ring lights, and lavalier microphones for each interviewee, then shipped those kits out to each of our on-camera subjects’ offices and homes with a detailed list of set-up instructions.

 

A Successful Campaign

With a little creativity, we were able to remotely record testimonials in different cities across the United States from the comfort of our homes. Our Creative Director remotely directed all of the interviews through the app, and our editors were able to download the footage immediately from the platform once the interviews were finished.We then had each of our interviewees provide us with photos relevant to their stories so that we would have “B-roll” to cut away to in the videos. Then, our Motion Graphics Artist designed and created custom graphic animations to make the videos feel polished and to provide us with branded placeholder slides to show off those still images.Our post-production team packaged all of this together into a series of videos, and the client was thrilled with the results.

 

Keep Creating

At REP Digital, we didn’t allow a pandemic to prevent us from creating testimonial video content for our clients. With remote recording software and user-friendly, high-quality production equipment available for shipping to any location, we can create video marketing content economically, efficiently, and from the comfort of home.