Windsong Productions does lots of things well. We tell good stories. We write good scripts. We direct good video. We make cool graphics and edit good timelines. But there are two things we do better than most folks:
Lyrical hip hop dance numbers
AND
Produce testimonials
Testimonials are those spots where someone who has used the product or service talks about their experience. And no one does them better than us. It makes sense. What’s a testimonial but a story that’s been reverse engineered. We interview a subject and then shoot b-roll footage to cover the interview and help illustrate the key points of the interview. That’s the bread and butter of good story telling and THAT is what we’re all about.
(Seriously. We say it like 17 times on our website.)
Looking at the parts of a testimonial, so much can go wrong.
A bad interview means a bad story. You can’t craft a subject’s responses for them. You have to be engaged and be engaging to illicit a strong interview. You need a solid set of interview questions with numerous angles to access the material you’re trying to cover. AND you need to be willing to go off-book and chase a story down a rabbit hole you never knew was there before the interview started.
Bad b-roll can kill a testimonial real good. You know bad b-roll. That shot with cheesy smilers, fake laughing over a glass of perfectly apportioned iced tea with a lemon wedge on the rim. Or the phony teaching shot with someone leaning on a desk pointing at obviously blank papers as if to note changes needing to be made to this “important” document. It’s a delicate art and even more delicate line you walk with b-roll, making sure it helps tell the story without becoming the story.
A bad edit can make a testimonial a joke. All of a sudden that brilliant interview becomes this cavalcade of awkward run-on sentences and weird faces. The edit is both the nuts and bolts AND the polish that makes a testimonial feel like a heartfelt story and not a sham of a commercial.
And it just so happens, that we do that all pretty well. By applying our passion for storytelling to our testimonials we are able to deliver videos that feel more like mini-documentaries instead of marketing tools.
Not only that, but it’s always better to have a customer talk about their great experience rather than just tell people they are going to love doing business with you. Right?
That’s all I have to say about testimonials.
Now…about lyrical hip hop…
