Doing great work for our clients is easy, but what about when we are creating for oursleves?
Highlight reels are not only a staple of our industry, but they’re also a great opportunity for us in the creative business to showcase where we’ve been, what we’ve been doing, and all the possibilities we provide for our clients. From a sales perspective, they give us the chance to highlight the diversity of the industry. Video production is such a broad spectrum of work that we need to be able to demonstrate the different types of video that we create for potential and current customers. All that said, becoming your own client to produce a compilation of your best work comes with its own unique set of difficulties
What’s great about highlight reels: First and foremost, they’re a minute-long memory book. When you’ve been zipping around the country managing, shooting, and editing video after video, it’s hard to stop and smell the roses. A video reel pulls all those projects together and gives us a chance to admire and reflect on our work. In addition, it gives us a chance to showcase the work we’re proud of and what we’ve created for our clients. The reels are short and entertaining, giving us the chance to catch our audience’s eye and advertise ourselves.
What’s different about highlight reels: What makes a highlight reel different from any other project we work on is the end goal – we’re looking to make ourselves attractive, not our client. Rather than telling a story for a client, we’re creating a commercial self-advertisement. For this reason, reels are often content-centered rather than story-centered. Our creative team has more freedom when there is no beginning, middle, or end like a scripted project. However, this lack of story and script can be a double-edged sword because it means the project is open to interpretation and can be modified after a series of reviews.
The difficulties of a highlight reel: Coming straight from our video producers, one of the biggest challenges of creating a video reel is selecting the footage that will be featured. Selecting from a year’s worth of cinematic footage is not only difficult but also time-consuming. Reviewing hours of footage to make final selections in a reel that will be about 60-90 seconds takes time to craft. We start the selection process with such a broad creative net that paring down can seem an impossible task. After footage selection is complete and the highlight reel is created comes the critique phase. As experts in our field, our standards are high, as they are for any of our clients. There are no rose-colored glasses when it comes to critiquing your own work, so we become our own worst critics. The quest for the perfect highlight reel is a long one, but the collaboration among the creative team is gratifying.
Creating a new highlight reel annually is demanding. Nevertheless, our team collaborates to carefully assess each shot, selecting the best of the best, and blending it together – telling our story. This memory book gives us the opportunity to appreciate our accomplishments while presenting our award-winning work. The power of a well-crafted highlight reel lies in its ability to capture the attention of our customers, entertain our audiences, and showcase our capabilities in the video and event production industry.