2017 was full of travel and new opportunities. Garney Construction, head-quartered here in Kansas City was in need of a new marketing video. They wanted to highlight several different types of work their crews in the field could perform. They have several offices around the country. That meant travel. We started with our script, making sure we knew what type of b-roll we would need. We edited it down until we had just the essentials. As we wanted the video to be 2-3 minutes in length, this meant paring down our voiceover and making sure we weren't adding too many details for our audience.
At the same time their marketing team had shared a few video examples from other companies that they liked. We discussed emotion and tone and look, voice over talent, etc. We wanted the grittiness of the construction industry but mixed with the beauty of the locations they work in.
From coast to coast, we traveled over a non-consecutive 3 week period. From Northern California to Colorado to Texas to Florida to Georgia, we highlit many of the builds their crews were working on. This also meant timing of when certain major build days were occurring. In Denver, we had to be up at 3 am to make sure we started our night to day time-lapse during a pivotal concrete pour. Construction crews typically work from 6a to 3p so we had early mornings and then late nights organizing footage and readying gear for the next day's shoot.
We also had travel days. We actually shot in Colorado one morning, packed and headed for the airport, flew to Oakland, CA, hurried (as much as you can in CA traffic) to the job site, finished shooting before they wrapped for the day, and then drove down the PCH to get into our next location.
So after a few months of planning and shooting, we hit the edit phase of our video. We had recorded our VO post shoot because we already had our script. I started on an initial draft based on our discussions and outline. Probably about a minute's worth of footage just to make sure we were all on the same page. Then after a round of notes, I got to work on our first edit. Fast-forward to five months later (I was out of town for 2 months of that, which the client knew about), we have come to our final edit. We finished the video off with a color grade and gfx, made some final tweaks and voila, a finished video.
I'm super proud of the effort all around to get this done. It takes a team of people to accomplish even a run-and-gun video where there are no actors or set talent. Take a look at the final product...