Well, where do we begin this story? Let’s start before the beginning.

Pre-Pre-Production

Harinda is Aamina’s friend from way back. They volunteered together at a non-profit organization back in the day and she always knew him to be this bright, motivated, and genuinely caring person. Someone who wanted to make a difference.

But life happens, and people move on to other things. Aamina and Harinda’s paths had diverged into different areas.

Fast forward to the present day, and Aamina and I are working together on Lunar Yeti. We are on the lookout for people ideally suited to our mission of ‘Bringing Out Humanity’s Best Ideas‘, and Aamina walks into the office one day and says, “Yusri! I know just the guy!”.

Anyway, they reconnect, and Harinda is intrigued, but wants to meet first. We oblige and head out to meet him and his wife, Alexis.

Our meeting goes well and we decide to iron out the details in the pre-production before filming.

Pre-Production

As is our process, Aamina primarily works out the details with Harinda on the topic areas that we want to cover in the videos.

Harinda sends over some quick notes of things he would like to cover, and Aamina and he go back and forth on his ideas. But we quickly realize that we need to have a more serious discussion in person.

What we learned here is that Harinda is brimming with a lot of thoughts. Too many for 1 batch of videos to be honest. 10+ years of deeply thinking about the problems of humanity will do that to you.

Our solution was to have a brainstorming session in the studio.

During this session, we were better able to nail down what he would like to start with and what is best to move on with in our first batch of videos.

It was a clarifying process that helped both us understand his thoughts and him to narrow down his own choices to what was most useful as the first batch of videos.

We narrowed it down to about 10 topic ideas. During this meeting, listening to Harinda speak freely and enthusiastically about his thoughts led us to decide to go with an impromptu interview style format.

For this format, we prepared a questionnaire based on our brainstorming session to interview Harinda, and he could speak his mind on each topic.

With this done, we were ready to schedule a film date.

Closer to the film date, Harinda informed us that he had given it some thought and decided that, considering the gravity of what he is talking about, he wanted to be much more precise with how he handled it and had actually used our questionnaire to develop some scripts.

So we then made a last-minute switch to a scripted format to ensure things are super precise and on point.

Production

The filming day started well, we set up the studio and equipment early and did some quick tests to check if everything is looking good.

When Harinda arrived we chatted a bit before starting and did a few more fine-tuning tests.

Harinda is actually quite tall (relative to us), so it was important for us to calibrate everything to be framed up nicely.

This shoot had 2 camera’s running simultaneously and we had a digital slate to help with syncing, making life much easier.

The shoot went extremely smoothly. One challenge we faced was that the second camera had a manual lens, but with a little help from the camera’s focus peaking setting, we managed to keep things in focus despite not having an active monitor on that camera.

We filmed about 4 different sessions to ensure that Harinda could change his outfit every 2 videos. This really helped keep the videos fresh.

There really isn’t much else to add as the film shoot went so smoothly.

Post Production

The post-production also went really smoothly, thanks in no small part to Resolve’s brilliant multicam editing workflow.

A little bit of pre-planning to ensure timecode sync was accurately recorded across both cameras helped ensure the painstaking process of syncing both cameras into multicam clips was super duper easy.

Beyond that, we experimented with creating beautiful motion graphics for the outro of the videos; the goal was to bring in his concept of creating a new north star for humanity.

We also knew that for this type of video, we needed to use some subtle but not insignificant amount of b-roll to ensure some of the points he was making were coming across well.

Delivery

We love delivery days. Its always a grand experience to see how clients experience their videos for the first time.

But delivery days are not just about delivering…they are also about imagining what the future could look like.

We spent time discussing some ideas and just chatting a little bit about where we can take this next, because we aren’t an agency just trying to pump out brain-rot content as much as possible.

We see ourselves as partners with our clients; our goal is to help their ideas flourish! To that end, we experiment and try different things, through the ups and downs, like a real partner would.

Anyway, here are some of the cool things we did together:

And here’s some examples of the vertical reel format videos: