Recent videos I have filmed and edited.

Eileen Mckusick and Marci Shimoff

Discovery

We kick off every project with a round of discovery. It’s our chance to ask and listen and really begin to learn what your story, audience, goals, and challenges are. This phase includes conversations, research into your brand, your market, your products, your people. Through this research we find and ask for inspirational material that may influence the overall concept of the video. These can be links to existing commercials, videos, films. It can even be books, magazine ads. Anything that will inform the style and tone of the piece. This is also the time for us to evaluate what your competition is doing, to make sure that we differentiate your brand from theirs.

Concepting

Armed with a strong sense of your brand, audience, and goals we then begin to develop concepts that we feel would best tell your story. We will write 1-3 written treatments that loosely define our story and stylistic approach. We often accompany these treatments with relevant links to help see the idea more concretely. These treatments serve as conversation starters to really narrow in on the concept that will guide us through the rest of the process.

Budgeting

Whether you have a 20k budget or 2K, we work closely with you to ensure that we give you the best results for your money. Essential to every creative kick-off is the question – where will you see the money on screen? For the biggest production value, we’ll scale the scope to work within your budget needs.

Script-writing

Once we have our concept defined, we move into script-writing. We work closely with the client to develop a messaging outline that provides structure for a script. As we write, we bring in all that we’ve learned about the brand, the story, and the tone defined by the concept. This is where we bring the inspiration, or the humor, or the emotion that helps to connect the story to your unique audience. The format can range from voice over to dialogue to written graphics titles. All of these components serve to deliver your messaging in a style and tone that makes audiences take notice.

Storyboarding

Style and story boarding can happen in parallel with the script-writing. The approved concept sends us down a path of visual discovery where we develop a look for your video. We make and find imagery that matches the style that we will capture in production. We also design any graphics and effects that bring the concept to life.

Location Scouting

We’re so lucky to be in the Bay Area, which has some of the most amazing locations on earth. We’ve also be incredibly fortunate to have shot in many of those locations. We know how important the backdrop of a film is to bring style, realism, emotion and we go to great lengths to secure them on a budget.