Week 7 – Reshooting (or not) our client’s video

During our Quarter Presentations a couple of weeks ago, most of the faculty wanted us to reshoot the decision aid video given to us by our client. They expressed concern over how the information in the video was presented, and the fact that our client wanted us to use it as the video source for the synthetic interview. In case you haven’t seen the video yet, here it is:

https://vimeo.com/152597351

The first thing we did was to look at what possibly needed to be adjusted to fit our target audience. That turned out to be a little of everything:

1. Some of the doctors in the video were not portraying themselves in a way that would connect with our target audience. Being stiff at times as well as monotonous, they were not the most appealing.
2. The video was extremely long, and would potentially have trouble keeping the patient engaged throughout.
3. Even though the video is so long, it is not content complete.
4. Some of the graphics needed to be re-designed to be cleaner and easier to understand
5. Other graphics needed to be more specific in detail
6. Sound design needed to be edited to be more clear

Our main challenge looking into this was how to appease both our target audience and those who made the video (doctors and researchers). Actual professional doctors will (most of the time) only trust medical materials if they are made by fellow professionals, no matter who they are intended for; an actor playing a doctor would not cut it. At the same time, the doctors most of the populace trust often tend to be t.v. personalities and characters in dramas – people who are charismatic and inspire confidence in the way they speak and carry themselves.

We came to a compromise in that if we were going to re-shoot the video, we’d use an actor with the same script that was used in the original. This actually solved two problems at once:

1. While doctors would be played by actors, they would be reading off a doctor-approved script thus gaining the medical community’s trust
2. We would not have to worry about getting our information right or wait for any script we wrote to get approved.

However, as Code Blue continued to look into this, we found that it would actually be better instead to leave the re-shooting to the original creators as they would also be in charge of creating and updating the video content for the app. This would allow for easy correlation in casting choices, graphic styles, and resources between each update and add-on. In addition, our deliverable is meant to be a prototype which the researchers can add on to, so building a platform for the videos was of a much higher importance than reshooting parts of it (which might eventually be reshot anyway).

As part of our deliverable package to our client, a document of suggestions on what to keep in mind when updating for future audiences would be included. This document will include things to consider for video production.