Elements Videos for Musical Social Work

Haasinee Halpé Andrée

A 1 and a 2 and a 3 and 4...

This project was in collaboration with Haasinee who leads a choir to help her build herself as a contributor to peacebuilding within Sri Lanka. She needed a way to communicate her ideas of peacebuilding especially through music and this batch of content videos was in service of that noble goal.

Share with a friend!

Creative Challenge

Haasinee leads with her gut and this meant that a scripted approach was not suited to her. She was far more comfortable sharing her ideas off the cuff, and we had to learn how to bring a lot of that story in post. We were also limited to one camera for this shoot, which restricted our editing a bit.

Outcome

The outcome of course was fantastic, she got a great set of videos to showcase her thoughts beautifully and resolutely. She was so happy that when we delivered it she shed a few tears!

The Process

This collaboration with Haasinee was one for the books. She was an extremely great person to work with and a vibrant and energetic character. Aren’t those the best people to work with?

The goal of this project was not just to produce some videos for her, but to help her clarify her message to the world. Haasinee is a woman of big ideas, but she has so many of them, and these treasures of thought were locked up in her head that she often found it difficult to bring them out in a way that people can really resonate with.

We worked with her on the right way to bring out her unique perspectives and helped a lot in post to ensure the stories she wanted to tell came out brilliantly.

Pre-Production

From day one, Aamina clocked that Haasinee is not a scripted kinda gal. She is a confident and expressive speaker and does best when she is going off the cuff.

So we decided early on to avoid scripting. Instead we wanted to focus on creating a format that would work for her.

Our initial ideas were to try to connect various peacebuilding ideas and concepts with famous songs; this was something Haasinee shared with us during our initial discussions. Maybe even have her play some of the songs.

We created a series of script ideas based on songs that Haasinee had sent us and refined the connections to their peacebuilding concepts.

Of course, we go back and forth with Haasinee to iron out the details. Meanwhile, because our studio was not quite ready to accommodate shoots, we decided to shoot at her place. This required a quick scouting visit to see how we can frame things up.

During the location scouting, we get to chat again with Haasinee and address some concerns of hers on the scripts and format. We make some final changes and decide to proceed with scheduling a date.

At this point, we tweaked the format to be more conversational, as the original idea was challenging for her to do, as she was currently practicing for a concert and couldn’t work on new music at the time.

Production

The production day had a few minor hiccups from the get go, we land at the shoot with all our equipment, lights, stands, cables etc. and realize the camera bag is missing!

Yusri had accidently left the camera bag at home. Oops!

Improve, adapt, overcome right?

So Aamina headed back home in a rush to bring the camera bag while Yusri worked on setting up everything else. Fortunately, Haasinee didn’t live too far, and by the time Yusri set up everything, the camera arrived just in time.

Barring that little hiccup, the shoot went swimmingly. We got fantastic footage, and Haasinee performed brilliantly.

behind the scenes of HA client shoot

We unfortunately couldn’t redo the shoot twice, as it was an interview-style question and answer, and she was speaking off the cuff so a second angle was not possible even though we had planned for it. Nevertheless we got some great footage and were confident we can make it work well.

Post Production

During post production another minor hiccup or blessing in disguise depending on how you look at it, presented itself in that we weren’t able to exactly follow our pre-production plan of ideas for the videos.

Haasinee’s impromptu conversational answers often veered in new and exciting directions that were a lot more interesting than some of the original video ideas. So as any good storyteller would do we chose to adapt our story to that new direction.

It was challenging to hide some of the cuts because of the single camera angle, but the videos turned out really great nonetheless. We used B-roll of the music she was referring to to help enhance the videos and communicate the story better.

Delivery

Delivery was really great because we visited her place and helped put everything on her computer and explained how we have organized the videos. She got 10 reels, 10 YouTube versions and thumbnails for each. We also got a few photos during the production so she got those as well. Not to mention we also wrote draft captions with YouTube titles which she can use (or edit) as she saw fit.

We watched a few of the videos with her and she was so happy she actually started to cry and Aamina couldn’t help but hug her! It was a really touching moment.

Here are some of the ones we liked best from this batch: