The Beautiful Social Video Production Team
Case Study
The Community Partner
The Beautiful Social Research Collaborative is a partnership between students and nonprofit or community-based organizations collaborating on a project where both parties mutually benefit from. Students are given the chance to develop abilities in collaboration in and outside of the classroom with effective communication strategies, while understanding and reflecting on being a community member and the process of working out of their comfort zone. B Social, our community partner, believes that using digital media as a tool to enact social change is a way to bring together students with communities outside of St. Joseph’s University. This is a course that allows community partners and students of SJU to work together in order to create and collaborate on projects. Bringing digital awareness to students allows them to complete work with a focus on social justice through their projects. Through Beautiful Social, community partners are introduced to new techniques and new ideas about how to communicate through digital media.
The Challenge
Beautiful Social connects students with their community partners. Our challenge was to frame the story of B Social as an organization itself. Our goal was to create a set of videos that answers, “What is the Beautiful Social Research Collaborative?” With hours upon hours of final reflection footage to pour through, how do we find the necessary clips to accurately represent the diverse stories of students’ experiences?
Working directly with Beautiful Social as a community partner was beneficial because a few of our group members participated in the Beautiful Social experience previously, so we had a head start. Working together with Beautiful Social was different from normal community partners because we got to work within our own organization, going through the years of footage collected from past groups and expanding on them to show to possible new students. Looking through all the different projects from previous years helped us develop our process for coming up for ways to look at the future.
While working on the Beautiful Social Production Team, we had various values and principles that shaped our project. Our main focus was to extend the message of what the Beautiful Social Research Collaboration is and how they work hand in hand with the community at large. So our design had to reflect these ideals, which is why we are putting together short promotional videos. We didn’t want to make the videos seem like a classic elevator pitch for the class, but rather a realistic portrayal of what goes into being on the Beautiful Social Team. We also wanted to keep in tune with the current Beautiful Social design layout, to represent a more strengthened front. As the videos started coming together, it was key to keep the themes we had originally set out for the same. It was important to sell Beautiful Social, but to also be truthful and honest in our approach.
Strategic Thinking
For this project, the research and design process differed from a normal video creation project. Due to the pandemic, and this class being completely virtual, we used footage and content from the past 10 years to execute our ideas. This was decided before we began the semester. We were tasked with the role of making promotional videos for the Beautiful Social brand, speaking directly to the multiple audiences that interact with the collaborative. These audiences are students considering taking the course, potential community partners, and educators looking to implement a similar program into their curriculum.
Some challenges that we faced over the course of the semester while creating these videos was the process of sifting through all of the footage in the different drives. Our process was to split up the group, some looking for audio clips, and others looking for viable b roll footage. Two group members took on finding interview footage from previous classes working with various community partners like Life After Life, Cradles to Crayons, The Mark Dombroski Foundation, and Vision for Equality. Three group members worked on piecing together the expansive archive of b-roll footage that seamlessly blends both halves of the project. After we all came back with decent amounts of footage in both categories, we all created individual storyboards based on a theme we chose to execute. After this, we came together to combine like ideas and narrowed our videos down to two different themes: “Why should you take Beautiful Social?” and “What is Beautiful Social?”. Though simplified to easy titles each video depicts the complexity of the course and the relationship between the students and community partners.
The issues we faced during the semester were the actual creation of the videos and how to execute them. It was a challenge to narrow down the viable footage from the drives and utilize them in different ways. We struggled not to use too much of the same footage for each video, in the hopes that they would not be too repetitive or similar in style. Though they are similar in topic we did not want them to be the same video with the footage moved around. To work around this challenge we continuously were looking for more footage in new places. Another challenge we faced was using a new video editing software to create the videos. It was everyone’s first time using a collaborative editing platform like WeVideo, so it was a learning experience. When editing together on Zoom, we helped each other learn the program and worked together to the best of our abilities. Overall, using a new software was not as challenging as we had anticipated it would be.
The Results
Together, our fellow, Lauren Kelley, and members, Megan Connelly, Lily D’Angelo, Julia Grundfast, Megan Masano, and Matthew Ridings worked together as a production team in a semester-long effort to condense the essence of what Beautiful Social is into short and engaging videos.
Our video projects will be posted to the Beautiful Social website to be presented to students and community partners. It is an informative piece of media that aims to capture the essence of the organization and how it benefits the community. After our time with our organization ends, the videos will remain accessible on the website indefinitely. The videos tell the story of the Beautiful Social Research Collaborative as an organization in itself as well as the role it takes on connecting students with other organizations in Philadelphia.
This whole year has been a challenge for everyone but by having access to the technology we have has helped us tremendously get through this project the most efficient way possible. Zoom has been a huge help in scheduling meetings and being able to meet to talk about our ideas instead of emailing back and forth. Also, WeVideo has helped us simultaneously edit together while in different places. This has enabled us to come up with better ideas and allowed us all to constantly edit and revise each other’s work.
