Museum of the Future Brand Manifestos

Clients: ImpactBBDO Dubai, The Museum of the Future

Goal: To introduce the Museum of the Future and it's vision at presentations and events.

Skills Applied: Premiere Video Editing and Color Grading, Video Scripting, Editing to Voiceovers, Footage Collection

Result: Videos were presented at a pitch presentation to MotF executives and used for various other events after being approved.

The Museum of the Future Manifesto videos were the first and largest project I completed during my time at the ad agency ImpactBBDO in Dubai. At the time, the Museum of the Future was scheduled to open in about a year, and they were looking for video assets that would introduce the museum and it's goals at presentations to potential board members, shareholders and investors. They had three specific messages they wanted to package into three videos: One that tied the museum to Dubai, one that would make people curious what their future could be like, and one that would tie the museum to building this future. They came to ImpactBBDO to create this videos, and the task was given to me.

For this project, I was simply given an audio file with a voiceover for each video, the script for which had been determined on the museum's side. My task was simply to visually underscore this voiceover and add music to make it a complete video with a clear message and story. I was given complete creative freedom as to what I thought the visuals should look like, as long as they clearly matched the voiceover. Since these presentations would all be held in private and these videos would never be officially published by the museum, I was allowed to use any video material off the internet. Most of my time for this project was spent searching for and compiling this footage. While working on this part of the project, I developed strong research skills and a sense for choosing the right visuals to evoke a certain reaction. I tried to imagine what visuals would go best with what the voiceover was saying, and then seeing what the closest thing was I could find to that. I then tried to match the feeling invoked by the voiceover as closely as possible with my music selection, and made sure the visuals were well edited to the feel and tempo of the music. 

One of the biggest difficulties about assembling footage from hundreds of different sources from the internet, however, was that each piece of footage had a completely different visual style. When looking over the finished videos, it was very obvious that they were spliced together from footage from various different sources. I decided that the solution would be to color correct and then re-color grade the videos. Color grading was something that I had only done on a very basic level previously, so I used online resources such as YouTube tutorials to teach myself about Premiere color grading. After a couple of days of taking notes and practicing, I went to work on each of the videos. First I had to make the video clips look as neutral and realistic as possible, so that they would all have the same look, as if they had been shot for the same video. After color correcting to make sure everything looked the same, I color graded each video to have a distinct visual style that fit with the feel and theme of the video.

After the videos were completed to this degree, I presented them to my supervisors at ImpactBBDO, as well as the marketing team at the Museum of the Future. This is when I first experienced the nature of feedback in the world of commercial video. It became clear to me that each person had a very specific vision for how the video would look and feel, and each person wanted my videos to be as closer to their vision as possible. I realized that probably the most important aspect of my job was implementing feedback in a smart way to make sure that every person was at least partially satisfied with the outcome. In the end, I feel that the final versions of the videos accomplished this, and working on them gave me the important skill of working off of other people's expectations and implementing feedback in an intelligent way.

This was my first major video project that I completed in a professional setting, and for a set of clients rather than for myself. In the three years since I created these videos, my skills have certainly come a long way, but I am still very proud of not only the resulting products, but also of just how much I learned during this project. It was only during this project that I became familiar with Premiere Pro to the degree that I am today, and it allowed me to begin honing my skills in visual storytelling, editing off of feedback, and color grading, skills which I value immensely to this day. It also gave me an introduction to the way video creation works in a professional setting, and made me become accustomed to working efficiently and meeting harsh deadlines, all of which are, as I learned, common realities in the world of marketing.