How To Market A University
Washington, DC
Overview
Terry Flannery, a pioneer of modern university marketing, wrote the book on how to market a university. Our team pitched her the idea of transforming her book into a “Masterclass”-style course that would bring the expertise from the book to life. With Terry as the centerpiece of the course, we brought together other influential leaders in the space that helped develop the higher education industry into what it is today.
My Credits:
Associate Producer
Production Lead
Camera
Editor
Using Terry’s book to guide the overall structure and framework of the course, we began selecting supporting voices to complement the book's insights with their own perspectives. We determined that the best approach would be to start production by gathering footage of those contributors as their interviews might influence how we want to position Terry’s core content.
Pre-Production
This project proved to be a huge and incredibly complex undertaking that spanned the better part of four months and filmed 19 contributors in 12 cities across the country. The majority of the shoots consisted of a team of three: two of my colleagues, as the Director and Producer, and myself as the Production Lead. After a few shoots, we became an incredibly efficient and nimble team, allowing us to bounce quickly between shoots and cities.
Production
One of my challenges was building a production kit that could travel easily without sacrificing the quality of the footage we collected on the road. I settled on a four-light set-up with two large rollable LED panels and two 1x1 traditional LED panels. With those lights, lav mics for audio, and the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K, I was able to maintain a high level of quality throughout the entirety of production.
Production for the main event, filming Terry Flannery, took place at Catholic University in our team’s home base of Washington, D.C. Without the constraint of airlines and travel, it was time to bring my A-game to this shoot. I utilized a second Blackmagic 6K on a slider as a B-cam and brought out our proper key light and light dome. For audio, I switched to a wired shotgun mic, removing the worry of our lavs dying mid-shoot. Terry opted to also have a teleprompter on-set so she could easily reference her notes and quotes from her book.
With 25.6 hours of total raw footage amounting to six TB of data, this project was a beast to edit. Thankfully, with the help of detailed notes from day-of shooting and my Director, who highlighted portions to incorporate, I had a solid storyline to work from. When I finished the 14th and final episode, I had delivered 10.8 hours of polished course videos.
We put together two trailers to advertise the course: one 90-second trailer and one 60-second teaser trailer – my personal favorite – featured below:
Post-Production
RESULTS
The release of the teaser trailer alone garnered more than 170 pre-registrations for the course and amassed more than $21,000 of sales, massively surpassing our goal of 40 pre-registrations. After its official launch, the course brought in over 600 registrants, blowing all of our expectations out of the water.
