The Fashion Event OCM Video Case Study

THE VIDEO STRATEGY

Instead of doing a typical event coverage piece for this story, we wanted to lean into storytelling and look at the people that make up the program and the event. We started by working with the College of Human Sciences to identify three fashion majors to follow throughout the spring semester leading up to the April show. We then identified the central conflicts in the story, the race against time and the challenges young designers face when creating original pieces.

THE PROCESS

In early February, we interviewed those three students and the professor to start to understand what the process for preparing for the event looked like. Our interview questions were wide ranging and really helped us get a sense of who the students were, how the event worked and how the program prepared students for their careers. From there, we kept in touch with the students nearly daily to capture footage of them working on their designs in the lab, from the initial sketches to the final stitching. We were at model practices, final fittings and stage blocking meetings at all hours of the day. On the day of the event, we reinterviewed the three students first thing in the morning at the coliseum as they were setting up the show. Those interviews were much more specific, as we knew what gaps in our story we needed to fill and we knew the students a lot better. We were able to capture the day of nerves and excitement as well as see them in their final preparations in the hours leading up to the show. For the show that night, we had one videographer in the front row and floating around the event. The other videographer was primarily backstage to see the designers and their models before and after they walked the runway.

Once all of the footage was captured (over 560gb), the edit moved really quickly. We felt like it was really important to tell the story of the program through the eyes of the students, so we spent time building up their personal stories. We also wanted to create conflict in the story so that the audience could get a sense of the challenging work the students were doing. We highlighted the race against time by adding graphics throughout the edit telling the audience where in the process the students were, and by including soundbites that talked about the long hours the designers put in leading up to the event. We used music to create a tonal shift from the preparations for the event to the actual day of show. We also built conflict by letting the audience see challenges the designers faced early in the story be resolved by the end of the piece.