Capturing culture on camera (sometimes by accident)
The company culture at EDITED is something special. It’s something we’ve put a lot of thought and effort into building and maintaining. It’s great. But it’s also really hard to describe in words.
So when we decided to completely redesign our jobs section, we knew we couldn’t really represent it truthfully by simply listing a bunch of benefits on a page. We needed to capture our culture in a way that was authentic and representative of everyone’s opinions. So we decided to let the people who help shape that culture speak for themselves. That making meant videos.
A lot of them.
We knew it’d take more than a little time and effort, but we decided to go for it. And not only did we end up with a series of videos we’re really proud of, we’ve given applicants an opportunity to hear what it’s like to work at EDITED from the people who already do. Unscripted and in their own words. As an introduction to who we are, what could be better?
Here they are:
At EDITED, we like taking on new challenges. So I (the marketing designer), along with our copywriter, Dante, decided to pool our talents and produce the videos ourselves.
Was it risky? A little.
Did it teach us a lot? Yes.
Were there problems to solve? You betcha.
Was it worth it? Absolutely.
Here are just a couple of the hurdles we faced along the way and how we got past them.
Hurdle #1: Convincing people to be in it
Very few people enjoy being on camera or hearing the sound of their own voice.
Especially people who aren’t being paid to do it. So once word got around we were choosing the “volunteers” for this project, Dante and I were instantly everyone’s least favourite people to get an email from.
Thankfully the EDITED team are all good sports. So with the promise that these videos would yield more great team members, a lot of asking politely and a bit of bribery in the form of treats — they agreed.
One trick we learned that helped us keep people calm was to stress that we’d be filming about 20 minutes worth of footage but only using a couple of minutes of it.
That let everyone know the expectation wasn’t that they’d say everything perfectly every time. It instantly put our teammates at ease (I just asked our Business Development Manager and video star Margaux and she said it did) and ultimately it made the whole process smoother. Margaux, as you can see, still talks to me.
Hurdle #2: Getting professional-looking footage.
Even though we’re not video professionals, we needed these videos to look impressive.
We take our branding pretty seriously, and we knew our videos would have to live up to our high standards if they were going to make it out into the world.
We ended up using three DSLR cameras on tripods to film one main shot, and a close up of each interviewee for cutaways. We had two softboxes to light our subjects and a little backlight on the floor behind them to separate them from the background. I used a wide aperture to get a nice blurry background, and we chose to film in the office itself rather than just against a plain wall so that you get a sense of the office atmosphere.
Sound was the most complicated part. Filming in the office meant background noise, so we used a set of lapel radio mics. We normally use them for our team meetings so that our New York office can hear us clearly, and they’re good at cutting out a lot of background chatter. Geoff, our CEO/sound technician, hooked them up to a soundboard so I could record the audio through my computer and sync it up with the video later.
The final piece of the puzzle involved me hovering over people with a camera as they worked to film some B-roll of our subjects in their natural habitat. All these elements came together in the edit and made the videos fast-paced and interesting.
Hurdle #3: Putting together a story
What really makes any jobs video interesting though is the story it tells.
Long before filming began we spent serious time coming up with open-ended questions that would get our colleagues telling their own EDITED stories. It worked out much better than just asking something boring like, “Why do you like working here?”.
Questions like, “How did you feel on your first day of work here?” and “What do you brag to your friends about when you describe your job?” put them in a space to move past generic responses to come up with personal answers that were sincere and — more importantly — real.
We also gave our questions to our interviewees well before we filmed so they could have a think about what they might want to say. Dante also threw a couple of surprise questions in while we were filming to add some spontaneity. From this, we pulled out all the (many) valuable things they said, cut them down, and crafted them into a story: combining pieces that talked about similar themes, and making sure that with each video you learn about what we do at EDITED and why you’d enjoy working here.
Hopefully you can see from watching these videos that EDITED is a pretty great place to work. We tried hard to make the finished products an accurate representation of our culture, but to be honest the video which captured that best is the bloopers reel.
Initially we put it together to pass around internally, just for laughs. But watching it now, it’s not hard to see the real, unfiltered culture of EDITED in every frame. Every botched line and mispronounced word sets off waves of laughter and support. It looks like who we really are when the cameras are turned off. Just this time they weren’t.
Like I said before, Team EDITED are good sports, so they’ve agreed to let me share it with you. Take a look and have a laugh, then check out our jobs section. Have I mentioned we’re hiring?
