This one is client work, which makes it a bit of an odd duck next to everything else from 2011 on this site. It is a short documentary piece I filmed for Cisco, for their series about how organisations use their network, and the organisation in this case is Texas A&M.
It is two minutes long, it is entirely b-roll and narration, and it is the most grown up thing I had shot to that point by a wide margin.
The Numbers
The argument the piece makes is that a university this size should not be able to have a personal relationship with anybody, and A&M managed it anyway. The figures in the narration, all as of late 2011:
- 5,000 acres and 50,000 students, which made it the sixth largest university in the country at the time.
- 300,000 Facebook fans, a milestone they hit in October of 2011.
- 7,000 likes on a single post about beating Baylor. At what other school does that happen?
- 21,000 Twitter followers, more than any school in the Big 12 or the Southeastern Conference.
The best detail in the whole script is the SEC move. A&M shifted its entire athletic program to the Southeastern Conference, and the first official announcement of it went out on Twitter, which meant the school had full control of its own news instead of finding out how it was being reported. In 2011 that was still a slightly radical thing for an institution to do.
Shooting A Campus You Already Know
Here is the thing about filming a place you have walked across every day for years. You stop being able to see it.
Everything on that campus was completely ordinary to me. The boots, the ring, the buildings, the statue outside the stadium, all of it was just Tuesday. And a piece like this does not want Tuesday, it wants the version a prospective student sees in their head, so the job was basically to go back around and photograph a place I was numb to as though I had never been there.
What worked was going for the things that are specific rather than the things that are impressive. Any university has a nice glass building. Not every university has a pair of maroon senior boots, or a ring that people wear for fifty years afterward. So the film leans hard on the objects that only mean something here, and lets the narration handle everything general.
What Corporate Work Teaches You
I want to say something about this kind of job, because filmmakers on YouTube tend to talk about brand work as though it is either a sellout or a jackpot and it is really neither.
A piece like this has a script before you shoot a frame. Somebody else wrote it, somebody else approved it, and your entire job is to deliver images that carry lines you did not write. That is a genuinely different muscle from a wedding, where the story arrives in whatever order the day gives it to you and you find the film afterward in the edit.
Working to somebody else’s script for two minutes made me noticeably better at the weddings, because it forces you to think about what a shot is actually for. Not whether it is pretty. Whether it says the thing.
Filmed on campus in College Station for Cisco, December 2011.