Client: The Emirates Nature/World Wildlife Fund Dubai
Goal: To engage Emirati youth in environmental activism and have them join the WWF's 'Connect With Nature' Program
Skills Applied: Premiere Video Editing, Premiere Color Grading, Story Conceptualization, Footage Organization
Results: Videos were used in an online marketing campaign for the Connect With Nature initiative
The Concept
The Connect With Nature videos were a project I worked on during my time at the Dubai office of the World Wildlife Fund. I created sixteen videos that were each optimized to specific social media channels of the Emirates Nature WWF's Youth Engagement Initiative called 'Connect With Nature'. These videos were meant to target youth in the United Arab Emirates and give them an interest in conserving their environment, as well as motivating them to join the Connect With Nature initiative as members, which would involve acting as community ambassadors for sustainable living and joining the WWF team on conservation trips and activities. Each video is optimized for a specific subset of our target audience. For example, the video above was created for those looking for social activities, the video below was created for people who wanted adventure, and another video a bit further down was created for those who care deeply about preserving the USA's heritage. Many videos were also catered specifically to male and female audiences. The creation of these videos helped me solidify my view that every video, no matter what the aim of it may be, should contain some sort of visual story, as well as making me significantly more efficient at video editing and color grading.
The Story of the Videos
The Connect With Nature initiative was a new project at the WWF, the aim of which was to encourage youth in the United Arab Emirates to develop an interest in the country's natural environment, and participate in environmental activism. The WWF would organize trips, events, and educational initiatives, as well as developing an app that would gamify the experience of discovering nature for UAE youth. An important part of this project was creating a strong social media presence that would work to encourage the target audience to partake in these activities. This is why the WWF team wanted a series of videos to gradually roll out over various social media channels that would show the target audience of Connect With Nature the diversity of the UAE's natural environment, the connection it had to their heritage, and the fun activities that could be done there.
When I came to the WWF, I was shown a massive archive with hours of footage from various WWF excursions and events that had been filmed, but never turned into videos. It was my task to use this footage to create sixteen videos for different social media channels. Each set of three videos (usually of three different lengths) was supposed to target a slightly different section of our audience. I was shown some peronas that the team had come up with in their user research that these videos would cater to.
The Power of Sorting Footage
Before I could begin making the videos, I had to organize the massive amount of footage available to me. Previously, I had always either shot or collected the exact amount of footage I needed for the video I was making. Now, however, I had to decide which footage from the set given to me would work best for which video. This made me much better at determining how to target different audiences in different ways, and creating content for a specific persona. Since most of the videos would only have visuals accompanied with music, I also realized that they would need some sort of visual story to keep the viewer interested. This is where I developed my habit of trying to make every video, no matter what the intention of it is, have some sort of visual story or journey throughout it, something I now consider to be the essence of my editing style. While assigning different footage to different videos, I kept these two elements in mind to make sure everything would fit together seamlessly.
Creating a Visual Story and Identity
After allocating the correct footage to each video, I began the actual editing process, now with the goal in ind of having each video tell some sort of visual story rather than just being a compilation of videos. I did this by choosing the right music to convey the feeling that would match what the target persona would be looking for, choosing the correct order of shots, and intelligently placing the cuts in between shots to make everything match up. For example, the video below this text is targeted at young Emirati women who feel a sense of pride over the UAE's natural heritage, and who feel connected to the country's nature. The voiceover is a quote written by the founder of the UAE, Sheikh Zayed Bin-Sultan Al-Nahyan, about how future generations of Emiratis will preserve the natural heritage of the UAE's environment. You can see that I decided to cut back and forth between people (mostly women) and animals looking out over the UAE's natural landscapes, transitioning from shots of mangrove areas to shots of desert areas. Going back and forth between people and animals is intended to invoke a sense of connection to the natural environment, the thought that the viewer is just as much at home in this natural environment as the animals that live there. Combined with the voiceover, this is intended to foster in Emirati viewers a sense of belonging. I attempted to do something similar with each video so that it would be obvious which audience was being targeted, and so the video and its story would resonate with the audience.
Additionally to editing, I also color graded each video in a way that they would all have the same sort of visual style, but still retain somewhat of an individual identity. A good example of how I did this would be to look at the sand in the desert shots in the different videos, and how the color of the sand changes to match the feel of the video the shot is in. Color grading was nothing new to me at this point, but it was the first time I was doing it with a goal beyond simply making the video look better
A New Type of Feedback
After the videos were finished, I went through the process of getting feedback and making edits to the videos. There was not many adjustments I had to make since, for these videos, there was only one stakeholder involved, the WWF itself, and not any secondary client. Most of the edits were based around singular shots that should be replaced, or the speed of certain cuts. It was, however, still a valuable learning experience, as having videos critiqued always is. The more interesting thing, however, was that this was the first time one of my videos was presented to a focus group. The process of creating the Connect With Nature initiative and its marketing plan heavily involved focus groups of young Emiratis to see what the responses to these campaigns would be with the actual target audiences. Having my videos get feedback directly from the target audience was a very interesting experience. One of the main takeaways I had from this session was that I needed the videos to be a bit more upbeat and exciting. I had thought this was almost impossible with the peaceful footage I was working with, but I gave it another shot and edited the videos to some more driving, fast-paced music. The result are the first three videos on this page, which I feel like are the best videos I made in my time at the WWF. This experience made me realize how important it is to know your target audience and their wants when creating a video.
My Takeaways
This project taught me a lot of things about producing videos to achieve a specific goal, yet still remaining creative and infusing a story into each video. Where previously the goal with my videos was to edit a video for a specific pitch or voiceover, the goal now was to convince a specific person of something, and do so while still making an engaging video and telling a story. The skills I learned while making these videos will be useful in any kind of project, since I now strongly believe that any video can, and should, contain a visual story. The set of videos here on this page demonstrates how many times one can make what is essentially the same video in completely different ways to cater to different people. Additionally to this new outlook, I also become much more efficient in my video editing and color grading skills, gaining a new sense of workflow and routine with my work that has helped me conceptualize videos much more quickly and easily. Six weeks of purely using premiere have made me much more familiar with the program than I was before and raised my usage of it to a truly professional level.
