Producing the Media Content for We Are Awesome

Along with empowering audiences by putting important issues into context, entertaining them with irreverent but enjoyable listicals, I also wanted to inspire them with heartfelt and motivational videos.

This would ensure that my website also possesses the power to inspire - which is an important theme for my website, among others - and would diversify it in terms of content, with videos to go along with the article heavy premise.

But I had a problem in conceptualising how these videos would take form. At this point into the project, my website is as strongly defined thematically, but the habit of making a video with the goal of inspiring others, can come across as cheesy and pushy. And it could more or less compromise my conceptual vision of how a website centered around fostering humankind to be more connected and powerful, should be like.

Therefore, I created a character that I felt would be better suited to discussing and proffering inspiration to an audience and make it fit into this idea of conception that I am aiming for with my website. His name is Mystery, an enigmatic character, who offers pearls of wisdom, while wearing a box on his head. The character-led approach, I felt, would be better suited to a video intended to inspire, than if I were to present it as me, as a character would give the videos a feeling of eccentricity and excitement, that a non-character approach would have trouble replicating.

Getting this character, Mystery, to become a figure of intrigue and authority on the subject of inspiration, was troublesome. I played around with the voice and the style of articulation and settled on what I can only describe as "1950's Received Pronunciation." Then there was the matter of what he would say in terms of dialogue to fulfill the motivational/inspirational premise. I looked at interesting facts on the internet and on motivational blog pages, and shaped his dialogue based on that. I felt that it was important to keep the videos to a minute or less, as to not bore an audience - and made sure the dialogue would not exceed that.

I sourced an appropriate location and background to film the video and decided that the video would be one take. This was purely in the interests of keeping me on track with life, not to mention the website, as there was the potential to get carried away with it.  A script using an analogy about a bumblebee and words of wisdom on life was written, to keep me focused in ensuring that the video would be under a minute, and have structure to it, as I brought this character to life - which was hard to do.

Upon finishing the video after many takes, it was uploaded to YouTube as this would be the best way to ensure that the video could be embedded onto my website and make the video, accessible on all browsers.

Completed video titled "Mystery Speaks: The Humble Bumblebee":