Recently we were introduced to the director of corporate development at the Winchester Medical Center Foundation at Valley Health through the Top of Virginia Regional Chamber.  At the time, the WMC Foundation was in the final stages of organizing their Annual Benefit Golf Tournament for their donors, which features celebrity guests that get to join teams of local players for a day of golf.

The Foundation was interested in producing a short video that could be distributed on DVD to potential celebrity guests for the following year’s event as a way to generate more interest and attract more celebrities to be involved.  In doing so, I worked with long-time colleague Jenny Brockwell, who is a familiar face in the valley because of her time on air as a reporter at TV3 Winchester and her heavy community involvement with the chamber.  Jenny worked with the Foundation to develop a script that would provide a good amount of background information on the medical center and the golf tournament, which we then refined into a format that would work in the short running time of the video and developed a strategy to present the information visually.

The end result is a video that clocks in at just under three minutes which, given the amount of content and our goal for a short video that would keep the viewer’s attention, ended up feeling like a good length.  The shoot was executed by a single director of photography, on location at the golf tournament and around the medical center and one of the foundation’s primary beneficiaries, The Hurst Hospitality House on the campus of the medical center.

The challenge we ran into in producing this was how to effectively keep a viewer’s attention when so much of the script involved listing data about the foundation and the tournament.  In the end, utilizing Jenny as on camera talent to deliver the information seemed like the best option, given the time constraints and budget for the project, and she did a fantastic job.  The final touch was an original music score produced in-house at DIGICO.  An original score can be key in giving a video a fresh and compelling feel where a stock track can become overly repetitive or just not match the intended mood of the piece.  Once we completed the edit, we delivered the video to the Foundation and it was approved without revision, which gives any producer a great feeling at the end of the day.  We feel confident that the video will be a success for the foundation and will hopefully bring a great range of exciting celebrities to the tournament in 2011, and as always we’re grateful and excited to have provided good service to a local business in the valley.