Pitching for a Corporate Client!
Welcome back to a new term and a new module – Live Project 2!
For this module, we had the choice between either an original drama or documentary to hand in for a film festival, an educational video that would then be distributed across the teacher’s educational platform Teacher Central or, lastly, to find a client and create a promotional video for them. Already since the end of November, I wanted to try and create a promotional video and learn the necessary basics that I would need to know in order to create a (corporate) marketing video.
My reason for this was the fact that I want to learn as many genres and facets in filmmaking as early on as possible in order to be more versatile for the industry after graduation. Since I already worked on short films, longer films, and even music videos, I thought that attempting to create and emulate the style and purpose of a corporate marketing video would be a splendid learning opportunity, that would furthermore force me to upgrade my knowledge and skills on camera and lighting.
For this reason, I chose to pick the one corporate client Filtronic that has asked for a promotional video and pitch my idea for him. Whilst I cannot publicly disclose the exact nature of the corporation and their products on this platform (and subsequently, neither my pitch), it should suffice to say that this corporation is located in the communications industry, seeking to sharpen not only their own profile and location of business, but also wanting to generate costumers on a business-to-business level.
Looking at the massive brief they’ve delivered unto us, it was immediately obvious from the start that they had a very clear and concise vision of what kind of product and what style they wanted, from the application of brand colours down to the very structure of the marketing video.
This, to be fair, was a very appreciative brief. However, as this client produces technology that – in many cases – fall under classification, we were still somewhat left unsure as to what we would exactly be filming. Anyways, since we were supposed to pitch our ideas to the client upon meeting them, I tried my best to create a pitch that was based on their brief.
And then, today, we went and met up with the client at their company to see what we would be filming exactly. Already after the first couple of minutes, it was obvious that we would not be pitching our ideas since the matter at hand became concrete enough and it would have become superfluous since we would mainly be reciting the brief back to our client.
However, after we’ve been explained the product in question and been shown around in the facility, we’ve all had a much clearer idea of what we were supposed to do. However, it was also immediately obvious that we would be challenged to a whole new level:
This was not only going to be a corporate marketing video, it would also be a corporate marketing video that would be shot in extremely limited space, with extremely limited equipment and in extremely clean rooms with a lot of classified items.
Does that sound mysterious and exciting? Imagine creating the module pitch for it!
However, I am grateful to have gone and met the client since it gave me ample opportunity of learning how to present myself in front of a client and interact with him for the purpose of creating a product (aka offering a service). The fact that this was a challenging experience that dealt with a subject matter on a very advanced level that I was furthermore not familiar with due to the nature and confidentiality of the product itself, made it all the more worthwhile to learn.
References:
Filtronic (2015) Filtronic Logo [online] Image taken from: https://www.fgiww.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/filtronic_logo.jpg [Accessed on 6 February 2019]