panorama Cultural Snippets
This series of 42 short ‘snippet’ videos was featured in the #1 college Spanish learning program. Each video short (30s-90s) focuses on a place, person or cultural aspect from dozens of Spanish speaking regions around the world. I produced this video at Vista Higher Learning (VHL).
THE CHALLENGE
The biggest challenge in this project was the sheer quantity of highly specific images and video needed to authentically represent each subject. After requesting bids from outside production companies to handle the production from start to finish, it was clear the available budget would not be sufficient. The most exorbitant part of every bid revolved around the cost to find and license the needed images and video.
The SOLUTION
FREELANCERS
To bring the project under budget, I shifted to working with freelancers instead of a production company and developed a systematic approach to research, validate and license the necessary media. I managed a team of freelancers to handle the media research and developed a work flow with internal stakeholders to efficiently review over 4,500 pieces of media.
CREATIVE APPROACHES
I got creative about reducing licensing costs.
Vectorizing famous people
It can cost a fortune to license images of celebrities and recent historical figures. As an alternative, we digitally vectorized and combined multiple images, altering components to create an original image with no licensing requirements. The final illustrations had a sketch-inspired style to match the video aesthetic.
Animating still images
Licensing video content is always more expensive than licensing images, and over the course of 42 videos, the cost adds up. To reduce this cost, we used a few simple techniques to animate still images instead of using video in many instances. The resulting animation is an interesting alternative to video, and, cheaper.
Conclusion
This project’s biggest success was in its efficiency, both from a cost and planning perspective. This efficiency was achieved by leveraging freelancers and creative approaches to maximizing media assets. The workflows developed in this project for researching and licensing media became common practice for this style of video at VHL, as did the animation techniques and overall aesthetic of the series.