How Covid Changed Our Relationship to Video
I’ve been thinking about how Covid changed our relationship to video, and how a small and nimble production company like ours can be helpful in this changed environment.
During Covid, everyone everywhere, by necessity, essentially became a daily video creator, engaged in what I think of as a daily Zoom talk show with colleagues, friends, and family. Inevitably, people started caring about their video and audio quality while also realizing they could improve or manipulate the story they were projecting on their Zoom screens. So we began building little studios with light panels and perfectly curated bookcases as our backgrounds, joking about how you could attend meetings in a dress shirt and pajama pants. The reality of a manufactured image on screen set in.
But this relationship to video storytelling didn’t lead to an explosion in consuming spectacularly slick, tech-driven content. Rather, the biggest platform and media growth during the pandemic and since has been TikTok, a platform that prioritizes authentic, mobile-first, participatory video. Was it creating perfectly lit Zoom setups that drew us to TikTok's defiantly un-slick aesthetic (and outrageously effective algorithm)?
For our customers, the early days of the pandemic were disorienting. So many of the usual tools for video storytelling were off the table, yet people still needed stories. Stories help make sense of a confusing world, and so this time became an unbelievable opportunity for brands, agencies, and NGOs who could use their story in a positive way to help audiences make sense of what was happening. But they needed a way to make these stories. How do you tell sensitive, human-centered, stories from afar? Much of our success during the pandemic was in solving this question, finding ways to make videos with real people using new workflows and cobbled together technologies. Later the remote production tools we put together with duct tape and bailing wire evolved to become new industry standards and go-tos in our producers toolbox.
Now two years since the beginning of Covid-19, we are witnessing a reset around social campaigns. On the one hand, audiences crave the kind of unfiltered content that they consume predominantly on TikTok. On the other, brands and agencies are falling back on tried and true creative and production models that create slick, produced work for social channels. But social media audiences are more sophisticated than ever—they don’t want polished—and the minute they spot an ad they quickly scroll right by.
One solution Cowboy Bear Ninja has successfully implemented is to take a hybrid approach to brand storytelling: combining the agency/client production model with a workflow that prioritizes using mobile devices and remote production tools. This workflow allows us to meet a precise level of creative execution, while creating agency/client owned and controlled social content that actually feels native and appropriate to the platform.
Our key elements include:
- Creating early test videos within the social platform, shot on a phone so that everyone is immediately familiar with the look and feel of the final piece even before casting begins.
- Using social-first directors who have the authority to help guide creative directors and clients less familiar with the platforms.
- And most importantly, using remote production tools like OpenReel and Riverside to allow clients to be virtually present for shoots, while actual on-location production footprints are so small you can practically shoot anywhere, and you are never in danger of over-producing a shoot which, at its heart, should be talent on a mobile device.
How many of these changes to our relationship with video will stick? Just like with remote work—where we’re often managing a new hybrid way of working—I think that the creative and aesthetic territory opened up by the pandemic will not go away. The pandemic made us all creators to some degree. We are excited to see how the tools and insights that we have developed will continue to serve meaningful stories.
