Creating Content for UCLA
Neal Foard is an old friend and collaborator. He was once my client as a creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi, and we made a lot of Toyota commercials together. More recently, he’s moved to LA, and he’s doing very compelling experiential marketing with MC2. Now that we’re in the same city, we try to find opportunities to conspire whenever we can.
Recently, Neal called me about working with him to create a series of films for UCLA. The university has an ongoing campaign called “Optimists.” These films would feature three people from the school discussion interesting topics. So… “Three voices on _______.” The UCLA communications team, led by Powell Michael and Michael Conboy, started us off with that concept.
We spent a lot of time with them thinking about how we could make the conversation interesting, and shareable. What would be the right flow? How could it feel authentic and real? But this is not something scripted with actors, so how could real people speak in compelling soundbites? Would one of our three people serve as the “Charlie Rose” character? We went round and round and finally settled on trying to keep it as an actual conversation. But that we would spend time in advance of the shoot compiling a list of questions & topics that we wanted to cover.
The first shoot was on the subject of “Brain injuries in sport” with participants Roman Phifer (UCLA grad & 15-year NFL veteran), UCLA team physician John DiFiori, and neuroscientist Adriana Galvan. We shot for about 90 minutes and then, with the help of editor Omar Lagda, edited down the conversation to 12 minutes. We learned on this shoot about trying to keep each participant equally engaged, and we thought about different ways to light & photograph the scene. On top of this, we edited a bunch of short segments for the UCLA social team to use across its many channels
So we took our learnings to the next shoot on the subject of Gratitude. This time we got a more freewheeling discussion. Participants Valorie Kondos Field (UCLA’s legendary gymnastics coach), Neuroscientist Alex Korb, and Religious Studies professor Carol Bakhos gave us a number of impactful moments. We felt like we’d gotten a little better at steering the conversation in the right direction.
We’ve now finished a third episode, in the subject of diversity in the workplace, featuring Academy Award-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and Hollywood Diversity Report authors Darnell Hunt & Ana Christina Ramon. This project gives us the opportunity to keep improving and getting better each episode. Most marketing projects are of the “one and done” variety. And we appreciate working with the smart and collaborative team at UCLA that includes creatives Brendan Flaherty & Stevie Spencer as well as producer Rosemary Fahmie. You can’t beat feeling like you’re aligned with your client trying to do good work.
