Race to the Top – Video Production In the Fast Lane

Written by Marcel Lemmes and Niklas Dorn. Originally published on Filestage The Advertising Bible.

For over 25 years, Know How! AG has been specializing in teaching and qualifying. Over 100 employees are constantly working on bringing the latest learning methods to companies and customers all around the world. Their credo is Enthusiasm, Inventiveness, Visions. It is the basis for over 1,500 international learning and teaching projects. From individually designed practical workshops to specialized teaching software, Know How! AG offers it all. Among their customers are companies such as Bosch, BMW, Daimler, and Siemens.

We talked to Alberto Sejas (Art Director for Design, Animation, and Illustration at Know How! AG) about successful projects, efficient video production, and office competition.

“In our work and productions, creativity is the most important component you could possibly imagine.” These were the first words Alberto used when he introduced himself and Know How! AG to us here at Filestage. And it’s true: producing educational videos that simultaneously teach and fascinate is impossible without fresh ideas, interesting designs, and a passionate behind-the-scenes team.

We all remember the boring documentaries back in school: narrators that almost put themselves to sleep with no no knack for storytelling or inspiration. Interestingly enough, you probably don’t remember what these documentaries tried to teach you. Alberto and his team know that learning is a process that needs to be interesting in order to be effective.

“For the best learning experience, we offer a unique mixture of communication, qualification, and change. Our solutions are individually designed for every single client,” says Alberto. “In our team, we work on a lot of different projects. To make every single one of them a success, my team and I combine creative approaches and ideas with competent communication.”

Ready, Set, Go! The Race to a Good Video

“Time’s also always an important resource,” Alberto continues. “In one of our recent projects, we breathed life into this idea.” Together with his team, he created an animated video about working methods to showcase the benefits of adapting to new ways of organizing and processing. “I don’t want to go into too much detail here,” he explains. “So to keep it simple: We had the idea of realizing this concept in the form of a little race. Old versus new, one worker versus the other. Who would win?”

Even though the animated short is 3 minutes long, there was a lot of feedback about change requests from his clients. “For example, we have been using stylized icons to showcase a lot of things. We had to change them rather often,” says Alberto. “But still, in the end, we only had 5 rounds of correction in total.” How did he and his team do it?

Competent Communication Is Key

Managing communication on creative projects is never easy, especially if you communicate with clients about them. For Alberto, video reviews with clients used to be an especially difficult chore. His team had to work with complicated lists and tables in which they noted time marks alongside the feedback they obtained. Without the most recent, correct version of the video clip as a point of reference, this data was very hard to interpret.

Even with the video right next to these tables, the feedback sometimes didn’t make sense to them. “When a client commented on a lot of details, colors, and elements in a single scene, their feedback seemed often very ambiguous. We had no way to precisely pinpoint what they commented on, so we had to ask for clarification,” Alberto explains.

“Communicating with clients about their wishes and their vision of the final product was just too difficult.” It was clear to Alberto: his team needed another way to receive feedback—a solution for their problem, including misunderstandings and ambiguity in client communication. There had to be a way to get precise information and comments from his clients about their videos.

“Our tables and lists helped us find out which scenes a client talked about. But for videos, that’s just not enough. We need information about the concrete position and the exact scene that a comment refers to—x and y coordinates, to be specific,” clarifies Alberto. After a bit of self-research, he found a tool that fits these requirements. “Now we use Filestage to manage video reviews. It allows multidimensional communication, exactly the way we need it. Our clients can just click on a detail in a scene and leave a comment right there. It has never been this easy to correct a movie!”

Time Saved, Money Saved

“Without Filestage, we wouldn’t have realized our little cartoon about the office race,” says Alberto. The precise feedback allowed his team to make review rounds much more efficient. “If we would have needed to spend more time on imprecise feedback and additional review rounds, we would have needed a bigger budget.” Of course, coming up to a client to bargain about higher production costs is always a hassle. “That would have impacted the enjoyment of the final product on both sides,” he adds.

But exactly how much time does Filestage save Alberto? “I spent almost 3 hours less with review processes every single week, all thanks to Filestage. It has become a very important tool for my work, and I don’t want to work without it anymore!”

This article was originally published on Filestage. Here's the full article:

Race to the Top – Video Production In the Fast Lane