We were tasked with the production of a series of documentary-style videos for the “Faces of Lennon” marketing campaign for South African brand staple, Lennon. The marketing campaign included custom designed banners, images and posters along with a series of documentary videos shot across the country. For this project write-up we will be focusing on the documentary videos produced for this campaign. The focus of the campaign was to highlight the individuals throughout the country that use Lennon products on a daily basis. The heroes of our country, that no one hears about. This project presented many unique video challenges, that empowered our team and pushed our expertise.

For this campaign we produced a total of six documentary videos across six provinces. Each video focused on the stories of a different families. In order to find the families we were required to identify a community within each province. Once these were established we needed to make contact with community representatives, who suggested potential families to be featured. This was followed by making contact with the families and arranging permission and dates to film them. This process took a long time as each potential family had to be made comfortable with the filming, luckily Lennon assisted us by providing each family with package of Lennon products as a form of payment for their cooperation. For each family the shoot dates had to be planned with ample opportunity to film. Getting a person comfortable in front of a camera can be a huge challenge. Luckily our team had previous experience filming documentaries and understood the process to make each family member comfortable. This was essential to the success of each documentary video as the focus was on each family. If the footage was not satisfactory, it meant we would have to repeat the process all over again with a different family.

The video featured custom designed banners, motion graphics and video transitions. They were designed in accordance with the marketing campaign and resulted in a unified and professional campaign of marketing content. When it comes to producing multiple videos, creating a video template in advance is essential to your success. The template provides a uniform design for each video and helps streamline production for each production step. The template also simplified the reviewing of each draft of each video. This was due to the fact that the filming took place over multiple days spanning across many months. This allowed us to produce each documentary video draft as quickly as possible in between shoot dates, which meant the Lennon team could review each video while our filming team was recording the next. We also split our team up into an editing and filming team so that each team could work independent of each other.

Filming this project was a fantastic experience despite the challenging logistics. Hearing each family’s experience and story was a truly eye-opening and grounding experience. We learned so much and truly enjoyed the journey of working closely with each community.

Looking to take your next marketing campaign to new heights with documentary video? Get in touch with our team today!

We are a leading video production company in Johannesburg and have one of the top learner management systems in South Africa. We specialise in Video Production, Photography, Graphic Design, eLearning Development, Web Design, Animation and Creative Consultation. | info@oliverkarstel.co.za | www.oliverkarstel.co.za | IG.com/oliverkarstel