The brief
Direct stories about research
Public Policy|Southampton (PPS) is a dedicated unit operating at the University of Southampton. Their role at the university is to support researchers. More specifically, PPS creates opportunities and training to help researchers engage with policymakers.
Research is intrinsically important. It’s one of the most effective ways to transform our world and drive change. However, it’s much less effective when it doesn’t go on to impact real world policy. It can’t do this without there being a solid link between researchers and policymakers. PPS helps to forge that connection.
In order for PPS to maximise their effectiveness, they need more researchers to actively engage with them. As part of this, PPS wanted to have a constant stream of research videos that they can publish.
What we did
This is an ongoing project. We work with PPS to create videos in blocks so that they can work them into their wider outreach strategy. This means that pre-production is ongoing. We have built a way of working that means we are in constant contact, looking at what’s coming up and planning accordingly. For our work with PPS, pre-production is very much about working out how we can be effective. Academics and researchers are so busy and we need to use all of our organisational skills to make sure that production is as efficient as possible.
We’ve created a formula for how we do production days with PPS. We look to book in as many academics as we can sensibly fit into a single day. We ask them a series of standardised questions, whilst also throwing in unique topics of conversation. This means that we have what we need to work with in post to get the right messages for PPS out into the world.
Efficiency is important, but the trick is that we do not cram people in. We don’t let production value slip in order to capture more interviews. We’re very particular about technical aspects like lighting and sound.
In post-production we tie these stories together. The challenge for this particular project is making sure there is enough information about people’s research without the videos spiralling out of control. This means using our judgement and being selective about which parts of answers we use.
For these videos we also add finishing touches like music licensing and motion graphic question slides.
The technical
Schedules and timelines
Production meetings
Filming
Post-production
Motion graphics
Music licensing
Stock footage
Subtitling
The result
Video that promotes engagement.
We’ve created multiple series of videos that PPS have very actively promoted. They have used these videos as a way of promoting research they have supported and encouraging other researchers to connect with them.
