What You Can Get With Half-day Filming: Habitat for Humanity Case Study

Sometimes, the best way to connect with your audience and make them feel compelled to take a specific action is by capturing their emotion in real-life scenarios that others relate to. People connect with people, so let’s put animation to the side for now.

You have an amazing video idea in mind and you know you need to appeal to your audience’s emotions to make it work, but you don’t have the skills to make everything look natural and make sure the situations in the video don’t look “scripted” or fake.

The solution to that is actually pretty simple: Work with video professionals!

Authenticity is important when doing live-action filming simply because it matters to the audience. People dislike bad actors because they ruin a good story. One fake smile and your audience won’t think twice and will continue scrolling, close the tab, or turn off the device. Bye!

And if you are in an industry that is all about human connections, human behavior, and all things human (like Habitat for Humanity), then at the center of your strategies must be real human emotions. Real smiles. Real struggles.

What You Can Get With Half-day Filming: Habitat for Humanity Case Study

We wanted to start off by saying that before we started filming for Habitat for Humanity, we first had a scripting session with them because even though the overall goal was clear to them, they just weren’t sure what to say.

It can really help to have a professional guide you through a video structure.

A scripting session is an important part of the video creation process because it makes everything clear: the direction of the project, the budget, the tools to be used, the project’s timeline, and many more. This is why we always start off with it and offer it for free.

You can schedule a free scripting session with us here if you are interested!

Habitat for Humanity opted for the half-day filming package that includes 3 hours of filming plus post-production. Within that 3-hour period, we were able to film several interviews and footage clips of the families.

That’s often the most common question when it comes to filming video content: “How long will I need to film?”

With Habitat for Humanity, we needed to interview a family of four (two adults and two children) and another adult. With the family, we needed time to set up the shoot at the family’s home.

To save time, we moved the camera angle slightly as we changed family members. This kept us from having to do a full scene change, which can take 15 to 30 minutes or more each time depending on how much equipment is used.

When interviewing people, you need to keep in mind their comfort level. If they’re nervous or more introverted, then you want to give them time to get acclimated and comfortable.

Sometimes, the person interviewing has to help them get lost in the conversation rather than speed through the question.

This is where working with actors can be helpful. Being a professional, they usually can take direction easily and flow through their lines. However, this isn’t always the case and is a topic for another time.

Interviewing children usually takes more time as well. Sometimes, you have to ask questions in several ways to get usable statements.

So what we’re trying to explain is that getting people to speak on a camera depends a lot on the person, but there are things that can be done to move along efficiently.

Usually, after filming interviews, we’ll get some clips that will be used over top of them speaking. These are b-roll clips.

We filmed this family in their home and porch doing some activities they mentioned in the interview as well as grabbed an aerial shot. For this kind of content, you’re looking for variety in your clips as well as relevance in your subject matter.

Keep in mind that the second location was right next door, which sped things up as well. We didn’t have any travel time, so there was enough time to get what we needed to create the video Habitat for Humanity needed.

Next, we moved to post-production or the editing process.

After the shoot, the footage was transferred to an editor. For us, this is done by uploading to Dropbox, which is usually completed the night of the shoot.

Then our editor reviewed the script and other notes from the shoot. He is able to weave together the video according to our plan and the goal we originally outlined.

The entire process took about 5 weeks. That includes scripting, scheduling, filming at the locations, and all the editing with several rounds of revisions. 

Here’s the final video: