The Week at Cosmic Joke - 19th Feb 2024

The Week at Cosmic Joke - 19th Feb 2024

We took a break from filming last week in order to get caught up on all of our self-promotional content like our website, showreels and portfolios. We kept the post production engines turning in our Manchester office, but otherwise we had less going on than usual. As a result, we’re just having a quick overview this week.

We will have a more detailed creative corporate video case study coming up in the next few days, so if you find this too light on the word count front, then make sure to check back!

Post Production: The edits and video projects nearing completion

We polished off a number of projects in our post production facility this week. We told you last week about our continuing work on a high-end corporate video learning series. This week, we completed the episode we were working on and it turned out great - a 45 minute masterclass that tramples all over the dry expectations of corporate video production and creates something that modern audiences can engage with.

various camera angles of a talking head speaking to camera for a training video
Alongside some interesting cutaways and visuals, it's key to always have an engaging talking head, with multiple angles and a well-lit subject

That episode is now in the process of extensive client feedback, whilst it’s also fine tuned as an interactive and engaging learning tool. We’ve got 3 more episodes that we’ve already filmed for this series, so we’ll be looking to crack on with the edit and visual effects of this in the coming weeks.

We also completed the first video in the talking head video series that we’ve been working on for the NHS. This video series focuses on making treatment decisions when dealing with relapsed or refractory neuroblastoma in children. We’ve been filming this series for the last few weeks and have often discussed it as an example of how important scripting is to corporate video production. This week was a chance to see how everything is coming together, by grappling with the post production side of things - namely completing the first edit of one of the videos, whilst conceptualising and delivering the graphics, look and feel that will make up the entire series.

a corporate talking head shot of a woman sitting against a window talking to camera
Moving forward with our NHS project - a series of web explainer videos
an out of focus female figure looking in camera with some placeholder graphics in the bottom left corner of screen
Once we're given the brand guidelines from a client, it's always fun to make them come to life on video - whilst always following the rules set, of course!

Music Video Production: Showreels and portfolios getting an update

In our world, it’s always important to take a break every now and then to review your work. After putting this off for quite a while, it’s been a big part of the start to our year. We’ve been developing this very website to be more representative of our filmmaking and video production, which means lots of new portfolio items to see and lots of new showreels to watch.

The biggest focus of the past week has been our music video production showreel, which is one of our absolute favourites. Music video production is one aspect of video production that we truly love - it’s such a creative and rewarding medium to work with. You can get a deeper overview by heading over to our music video page and checking out some of the new portfolio items. We’ve got plenty more new bits and pieces to see in the other parts of the website too, so whilst you’re there, why not take a look around?

a crowd at a music festival, one person is on someone's shoulders, filming what he can see
Some exciting new content is now live on our website!

On the Socials: We LOVE pancakes!

Sometimes you’ve got to make some video content for the fun of it, so that’s what we did for most of our social media video content this week.

We took the opportunity of Pancake Day to head out for a team breakfast on Tuesday, which helped some of us who were still mopping up the Super Bowl hangover...It also presented a great chance to shoot a little bit of food and drink video content, featuring the three of us...stuffing our faces! We like to think that every social media video we post is a little advertisement for our video production skills, so true to form, we didn’t just pan our iphones across some pancakes, but instead experimented with some post production tricks, like speed ramping and seamless transitions. All a bit of showing off, but it was fun…and tasty!

We had even more fun celebrating Valentine’s Day with a reel that showcased everything we love. Obviously beer and pizza featured heavily, but we also spent some time looking behind the scenes at our filming exploits from the last few months…because making films and creating videos is obviously the thing we love the most! If you didn’t know that, then maybe you need to get to know us better

Looking Ahead...

We’ve got a busier week ahead this week: we’ll be filming some promotional videos for International Women’s Day 2024, which includes a lot of corporate video script work, as well as trying to complete the long form talking head project for the NHS. We’ll also be having an updated overview of social media video strategy with a few clients to plan for work in the coming months and continuing to update our showreels and website. See you here in a week's time!

If you’ve stumbled upon this post by accident, or like what you’ve read and want to know more about us, then we’re Cosmic Joke, a film and video production company based in Manchester. We specialise in music videos, live event filming, commercials and bespoke branded visuals. We create engaging short form and feature length film content that has screened around the world and you can learn more about everything we do here.

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