I made a short video for my job this weekend. This marks the 22nd consecutive year in which I’ve created at least one filmlet.
There are pluses and minuses to being asked to make a video for my employer. One plus, surprisingly, is the tight time frame. If you read this blog, then you may have noticed that, every once in a while, I’ll post a new video creation and I’ll say something like, “Yeah, I filmed this 10 months ago, but didn’t finish it until yesterday.” Or something even more extreme. So, I like that I had to get it done this weekend.
The downside is having to run over to my computer whenever I had some free time so that I could complete it. I generally prefer to have less computer time on the weekends, so this past weekend was an unfortunate anomaly.
This morning, at a meeting, I showed the video to my manager and a few co-workers. They made a few suggestions. I heartily agreed. Then I spent about a half hour tweaking the video, then showed it to another co-worker, who came over to my desk about ten minutes later with more suggestions. He actually had a list of five suggestions (I took three of his five). Then, at 3:00, I showed it to another co-worker, who had two more ideas.
I think the lesson learned is: never show my videos to anyone until I’m all done, then just say, “Here’s the finished product.”
I’d like to post the video online to share with you, my loyal reader(s), but as it has proprietary information on it, I guess it can’t make it’s way onto the world wide web.
So what kind of video is it (training, safety, advertisement…)? Who is the target audience (external customers, internal customers, new hires…)? Will you get paid for the time you worked on it over the weekend?
You bring up a valid point, which is that I totally botched the blog post by leaving out all the interesting information.
To answer your questions…
It’s an informational video. Last summer and fall, I worked with a few others in my department to make a new lab that simulates a hospital’s catheter lab. That way, when internal customers (likes salespeople) and external customer (like nurses) come to visit, we can bring them in there and ask them what they think of package X in a real-world environment.
A couple of months ago, my manager asked me to get some photos of the lab to put on our intranet site. I did that, and I also added in a a 30-second video that consisted of me swiveling 360 degress to show the whole lab.
Later this week, my manager and another colleague are going to a big event for the whole company, and they’ll have a booth set up there and they asked if I could make a longer, more comprehensive and better-quality video to show on continuous loop on a laptop that will be sitting on their table. So I did.
After that, the video will be loaded onto our intranet site, so then the target audience will pretty much be “customers who live far away and are thinking of visiting.”
And, yep, I’ll get paid. I’m paid hourly, so this will make for a larger paycheck since I had my 40 hours before the weekend began.