Ironically, creating an idea from a clean slate is more difficult than when there are limitations. So when you receive a briefing that is, well, brief, it’s time to employ some ideation tools that can help you create a corporate video from scratch.

Start with a Random Word
For Waverley Private Hospital that word, or in this case phrase, was ‘à la carte’. Former CEO, Jill Gleeson, was proud of her catering department’s new strategy to move from a set menu to one with choice. She was so passionate about the change, she believed it would win the Ramsay groups’ annual award for innovation but to enter, she needed a compelling video. To make the brief even more challenging, the winner would be judged by the audience at the Company’s end of year lunch so the video not only needed to be informative but it had to be inspiring and fun.

Words create images. Random words create random images. For the creative team at Mezzanine, à la carte, cunjured ideas of French chefs and kitchens but most vividly, of MasterChef. A treatment was created involving hospital staff in a comical parody of MasterChef judges reviewing Waverley Private Hospital’s new cuisine. The final five-minute video was inclusive, engaging AND humorous. It was no surprise that Jill’s team won that year’s innovation award. 

Constraint is the mother of invention
Budget is often the biggest constraint when producing a corporate video, short film, or web series. The basic rule of thumb is that every minute of screen time requires costs approximately a thousand dollars to produce, excluding location fees and actors’ wages. 

So when MessageMedia came to Mezzanine Films with a tiny budget and huge expectations, the team got inventive. MessageMedia wanted a recruitment video that highlighted it was an awesome place to work because it could lead to global travel opportunities. As it happened, Kevin, a young designer from MessageMedia’s in Melbourne was about to fly to the San Francisco head office for a logistics meeting. Armed with just a GoPro and a crash course in videography, Kevin documented his flight to and from the US, as well as all the business and fun in between. With some seriously creative video editing from Mezzanine Films, Kevin’s hours of footage from his one-week trip was humorously sped up, creating an exciting employer branding video on a tiny budget.

If you’ve been tasked with producing a corporate video from scratch, but don’t know where to begin, let Mezzanine Films guide you through the ideation process.