Two years ago I put together a strategy for the last school I worked at to include video on our website. The original point was that it would be shot by current students and be really true to their experience. It was purposefully going to have an amateurish quality to it, since I think that adds authenticity. I got approved to get a ton of video equipment, final cut and an iMac but it took a while to get it ordered and delivered so I didn't actually get my hands until Spring 2007. I had been toying with the idea of having a student do a video blog for a while and I recruited a kid that I had known for years to be my guinea pig. He shot video for about a month and then came to ask if he could take the camera on his trip to London. I said sure, not seeing any real downside to the situation. Unfortunately said student thought it would be a good idea to ignore signs at Westminster Abbey that warned him against any photographic devices and had all of his tapes confiscated. He lost everything.
So Summer comes and I had nothing to work with. Plus there were very few students on campus at this point so really there was nothing to shoot. But I was lucky to have a very industrious student interning for me named Geoff Ankuda. Now hear this: if you ever get the opportunity to hire Geoff, do it. Even as a student, I viewed (and treated) him like a professional and he lived up to every expectation I had.
I gave Geoff a lot of freedom that summer to work on projects he wanted to and one of them was video. The college had a great summer program for high school students that recruited a lot of students for the school so Geoff decided to take on shooting video of the camp and edit it as one of his projects. I was thrilled. Not only would this be great recruiting material for the camp, but it would also be great for former campers to really show pride on their social networking profiles about what they had done over the summer by posting the videos (we were just going to use Google video to host the files).
Geoff spent weeks laboring over this - when the summer camp was running, he was out there every day shooting. In between, he was sitting in my office editing. He ended up creating dozens of short video clips about this camp, which not only included some of the interesting activities they did but also really candid interviews with the campers. The end product was exactly what I had envisioned it being.
But I wasn't the one who had final approval on it. The people running the camp did. And they didn't like it. It was a bit too real it seemed, and lacked the sort of marketing fluff and dramatic music in the background that are typical of recruiting materials. So well I put it up on Google video anyway (where I'm positive you can find it to this day), it never made its way to the main site like I had originally intended. Both Geoff and I were disappointed. I felt terrible that he had put so much work into something only to be told no. While it's a harsh reality that you have to deal with in the real world, I was hoping to shield him from that while he was a student and still gaining confidence in his abilities.
This project for me was like a comedy of errors and there were definitely times throughout it when I looked up to the sky and, with my palms turned out, said "why????" Every time something started to go right, something else would happen that would blow everything off track. By the time I left this school in the fall, we had used some video on the site, but were certainly not at the level I had hoped for.
What did I learn and what would I do differently:
- Manage expectations. I think the primary reason the video never got used was the fact that people didn't really understand what YouTube style video meant. They thought it was going to be professional quality recruiting style video, when that was never the point. Next time I would make sure everyone understood and had viewed and approved an example of the type of video I was talking about.
- Set ground rules. I'm known to be pretty lax with student workers. I think if you trust them (and play a major Catholic guilt trip on them), they will usually rise to the occasion. In the name of authenticity, I basically gave a student a video camera and said "don't break it and don't film anything that could get you expelled or arrested....go!" It never occurred to me that the student would lose a month's worth of footage by bringing it somewhere he shouldn't. If I ever do this again, I am definitely going to come up with a few common sense guidelines.
- Time management. I'll be the first to say it - I am HORRIBLE when it comes to taking way too much stuff on. I know it sounds like one of those fake answers you give when you're interviewing and they ask what you're weakness is, but its true. Looking back, this video thing was huge and I just didn't have time (along with everything else going on) to deal with it. I also didn't want to stand up to my former employers and tell them that, because it just wasn't something that was done in the culture of that office. I wanted to be able to do it all...and that's good...you want employees that are excited about their jobs and have high goals...but sometimes you just can't achieve it all.
- Some things are just out of your control. Well it's important to reflect on the things you could have done differently, its also important to say that some things are just out of your control. I couldn't control the fact that the director of this camp has a vendetta against Geoff for not being a cadet at the school and therefore wasn't inclined to use something he produced. I couldn't control that they decided showing students use a wooden (fake) knife in survival training was just too scary a scene for prospects and parents when they didn't have a problem with us filming it in the first place. You're always going to have things in a project that you just have no control of mitigating and for your own sanity, its important to acknowledge them.
Have you had any projects that were colossal failures? Share them in the comments, along with what you learned!
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