My first client as a freelance photographer and filmmaker was the University of Sussex Students’ Union. In preparation for the new semester and students, they asked me to produce a few promotional videos to support their marketing strategy.
Project 1 was a generic intro video about what the Students’ Union is and does. I created a few different versions of it for various uses. The main video looks like this:
Project number 2 were videos to introduce the six newly elected full-time Students’ Union officers. Those officers are recent graduates or students who took a year out of their studies to represent Sussex’ students to the university.
Producing those profile videos was a lot of fun. I started out with an email questionnaire to find out more about the six officers. With this, I then went on to create a rough storyline for each of the videos. This step made it a lot easier to conduct my individual interviews as they were based around what I learned through the questionnaire.
The filming happened over a few days in early September where I spent a couple of hours with each of the officers. Knowing what I wanted to get out of each story definitely helped to make the whole process quick and easy.
I hope these “moving portraits” as I would like to call them, will give the students a better idea of who the officers are and what they do.
Filip, President
Becky, Activities Officer
Chris, Undergraduate Education Officer
Niina, Welfare Officer
Ijlal, Society and Citizenship Officer
Benjamin, Postgraduate Education Officer
I loved working with the Sussex Students’ Union. Coming from a video production job where I worked in Higher Education for almost four years, made me feel very much at home with this job. Luckily they seemed to like me and the work I did for them, so they got me back for Freshers’ Week. Throughout that week, I documented a few of their many events they held to welcome the new students. More about that later though…