VIDEO: COMPANY VALUES
Back in February of this year, our global team released an updated and refreshed set of internal company values. We’d gone from three values up to five which touched on things like safety at work, integrity in your operations, authenticity, teamwork, and overall how the expectations in which we held ourselves when representing the Hertz brand. As these came from global, their overall look & feel was centred towards an American audience, which was something that was pretty standard for our company, so when the HR/L&D team reached out to me to curate a localised version, I was pretty stoked.
(1) Safety First. No Compromise.
This is one of those few projects where I had been given complete creative control. Granted, I had a values themselves to keep me on track, however the deliverables of this project were a poster that outlined the new values that reflected our Australia, New Zealand & Asia-Pacific region as well as a video to accompany which was to be used within onboarding material for new staff. From the get go, this is one of those projects where I could immediately envision exactly how I wanted it to look and I was very, very fortunate that those who were involved with decision-making could see and trust my vision. This one was very important because it did eventually get shared back with global, so I knew that there would be a lot at stake being responsible to represent the Australia, New Zealand and Asia-Pacific region. To complicate matters further, we needed to present within 10 weeks of the project being briefed, at our next quarterly APAC-wide business meeting. This meant 10 weeks to conceptulise, storyboard, script, scout, film, and edit. As you can imagine, from the get go it was game faces on and a top priority whilst I was balancing my existing and day-to-day workload.
(2) do the right thing. always.
As mentioned, I was very fortunate to have gotten a lot of trust and support from external stakeholders involved which meant that I was responsible for every single step. The process started with conceptualising the poster with each of our values that would later serve as the benchmark for the video. Our values from global had quite wordy descriptions & we knew that manipulation would be out of the picture which is why we settled on a panoramic landscape spec size. This ensured that each value could be represented within a verticle slab and as you moved from left to right, each value connected with each other & sold the narrative of working for The Hertz Group.
After the visual direction of each value was decided upon, reviewed and approved, it was time to move onto scripting & storyboarding. A priority of mine when fleshing out this project, was to keep mindful of timings. Being realistic, nobody wants to sit through a 5 minute corporate video on values – it needed to be engaging, punchy & professional so the goal was keeping it under 3 minutes. Building out all of those storyboards, frame for frame, for each value so that I could clearly communicate my vision to those external stakeholders was vital. They needed to understand my vision so that they could trust me as reshooting & weeks of revision come the editing stage simply was not in the cards given the timeline. It was also pivotal to gain their trust as my vision for this project was to travel out into the field and shoot with real staff. A company value video on Hertz’ values? Let’s get the people who live and breathe it to be in it! There was no better way to represent our region than by enlisting the talented & diverse staff that have to be the talent.
(3) Debate with respect. commit with conviction.
In the end, the script was quite easy. I enjoy copywriting as it comes easy to me & since I could already so clearly envision exactly how this project needed to be executed, breaking down the descriptions of the values into digestible dot points was almost the easiest part of the whole project! We already had the values themselves so it was just a matter of breaking down. Especially since I knew that I wanted to film with staff, as anticipated, we worked with people who didn’t have a lot of experience being in-front of a camera so the decision to make each shot/line simple meant that we didn’t have staff who had to memorise lines & lines of script and kept our 2 shooting days moving swiftly. Having it in dot point format also meant that once some dynamic panning or zooms were introduced when filming, our shots ended up being quite dynamic & the pacing of each shot was very engaging – a very successful approach.
We first scoped out Melbourne Airport, due to accessibility, and our Alexandria Downtown (a location based in Sydney) as were not only familiar with the location manager (the team often filmed at this site) but had an upcoming shoot there that I was fortunate enough to jump in on last minute. In the end we did opt for shooting at Alexandria Downtown and Adelaide Airport due to logistics. What was special about shooting in Alexandria was the fact that some people from Sydney Airport came down for the day to be apart of the video which resulted in an even higher scale of diversity of talent/staff. We put the call out to people within the region so those who put their hand up to be in it were meeting us where we were at in terms of passion & commitment which resulted in some great footage & an overall outstanding video.
(4) Own it. drive results.
As mentioned, the margin of error for this project was very close to none so to ensure our day ran as smoothly as possible, the run sheets had to be accurate. Accounting for all details like morning travel, morning briefing, shot blocking, the filming itself, quality checks & then repeat for each value – in the end I actually overestimated the timings which worked out well as it meant that we had spare time to do reshoots, trial different shots that we considered day of (due to car park availability, weather & purely having the time to experiment) as well as plenty of BTS for our internal communications platform/to have on hand.
After 2 days interstate to do all of our filming, it was time to actually do the editing and piece everything together. This is where the time was starting to invade us so there was a bit of pressure to get it all done and ensure that it was getting the appropriate checks from everyone that needed to sign off, as there were quite a few stakeholders involved. Since my storyboarding has been so comprehensive, it meant all checks & approvals were very easily passed & everyone was quite impressed with the quality of the content. It had somehow come out better than I had even imagined!
(5) One Team.
There wasn’t a piece of this project that I didn’t love. Stemmimg from my own hobbies and strengths, as someone who at their core just likes to make really cool things & wants to get their hands on as many projects and opportunities as possible, this was such a great project for me. Having that passion was the factor that made this video as great & polished as what it was – the art of giving a shit means you’re end up with some really cool pieces & this was no exception.
This project was absoloutely aligned with the type of work that I welcome moving forward. Getting a taste of it to this scale & at this capacity of onwership was incredible and will continue to be something that I chase as I continue to progress throughout my career.
As far as considerations go, if there had been anything that I would have done differently for this project, it would have been ensuring that both myself and the 2IC who came with me, both had the right tech. I was fortunate enough to ensure that I had all of the right cameras and microphones and everything that I needed to succeed, however, the person who came with me to support was filming BTS on their phone so it would’ve been nice for both of us to have that same quality of content. Sometimes, factors like these are outside of your control and you need to be flexible and adaptable to the conditions but if I were to nitpick, this would be something I would amend for future projects as all assets (no matter who was responsible for shooting) would have been shot at the quality.
