The video in a day project.

Here at Velocity, we pride ourselves on making brilliant work. Stuff that moves the dial. That excites and informs. That wins awards (#HumbleBrag). 

And that takes time. In fact, Doug wrote a great post about how taking time to make something the best it can be is more important than meeting a deadline. 

And while that is 100% true, it does come at a cost. 

The downside to this way of thinking is that occasionally you can catch a case of It’sNotPossible-itis without realising it. Making a video in less than seventeen years? Forget about it. It’s not possible. Not if you want it to be good.

To immunise ourselves against this terrible affliction, we like to run little experiments. Tests that push the boundaries of what we think is possible. 

Video in a day

Our latest experiment: the ‘video in a day’ project. Imaginatively titled, the video in a day project is simple. Take one designer (Mathilde) and one writer (me). Put them in a room for a day and don’t let them out until they’ve produced a video. 

Arrive with nothing, leave with a video. Easy, right?

Because I’ve got some experience doing explainer bits to camera from my days at TechRadar, we thought we should probably try an explainer to camera. 

And because our panic-wracked brains were basically just screaming “VIDEO IN A DAY” on loop, we thought we should probably make a video about making a video in a day. 

You’ll see the structure of the day (and all the equipment we used) in the video so I won’t break it all down here. 

The video that we made in a day

Like all experiments, some things went wrong:

• Some footage is overexposed/out of focus
• Half the footage came back with terrible audio so we had to do a little ADR 
• The editing is a little loose
• The hilarious rendering gag doesn’t really make sense as we ended up not including CGI stuff that would have taken a long time to render

But (and this is a big but):

WE MADE A VIDEO IN A DAY! 

We invested a day of designer time, a day of writer time, and about £80 in stock footage and music, and we got this:

Experiment: successful.

Lesson: You can make a pretty good video in a day. So maybe you should…