ABOUT

Back in January, I started work on a video project for The University of Manchester. The brief was to celebrate and publicise their ‘school governors initiative’, a programme where university staff help schools and colleges to improve, and in turn, provide an opportunity for self-development for those that volunteer.

Their initiative has won a handful of awards and I was keen to create a video would do justice to the hard work and accolades won by Alison, Stephanie and the social responsibility team at the university.

This projects covers;

Storyboarding
Digital and hand drawn Illustration
Info graphics
Motion graphics
Video editing
Voice over
The Process

Working closely with the team, we started with the script. Concept visuals were sketched out and then both were combined into a slideshow to give a rough idea of the story they wanted to tell, and how the visuals and voice over would work together.

There was a lot of information to get across in the script including surveys and stats, so I considered it important that the illustrations carried a narrative. Two of the key scenes identified from the script were the establishing shot of the university itself and the big success of ‘over 1000 governors’.



Naturally the script went through revisions, and what started as a three minute video eventually expanded to around eight minutes to get the entire story told. It was a tough call to leave anything out, so we decided to go ahead with the longer edit and treat it as a short film.

For the voiceover, I did the initial pass using a Snowball Blue microphone, which is perfect for voice work. Then dipped into the talent pool of my performer friends at Comedysportz, who individually have done voice work for talking books and video games and offered a handful of voices to choose from. After choosing Rob, a recording session took place, which was edited and synced up to the video.