Case study: BMWL Public Affairs and communications agency
BMWL works with their clients to tell stories that influence public opinion and policy, and video is a major part of their work — but their process spanned a ton of disconnected tools and needed a rehaul. Enter Scenery.
"Scenery brings every phase of production under one roof for our team, simplifying editing and production as well as client reviews. Ultimately this saves me and the clients a ton of time as we move from idea to finished product.”
Key impacts
- Production capacity increased 200%
- Project completion time decreased 40%
Leveraging video to tell better stories
BMWL is a full-service advocacy, strategic communications, and public affairs consultancy that works with a wide array of organizations to share their stories and influence both public opinion and policy. While their work for clients spans a broad range of media types, creating compelling video to tell their clients’ stories has become an increasingly important and effective medium for getting the word out about the subjects and people that matter most for their campaigns.
The challenges of scaling video production
While BMWL understood the value of incorporating video into their campaigns, scaling their output in a sustainable way was an ongoing challenge. Lia Aiavao, BMWL’s Deputy Media Director, was at the very center of this dilemma as she thought through plans to increase the firm’s production capacity.
As an experienced Premiere Pro editor, Lia could do a lot of editing work on her own, but as they took on more video work she had to enlist a growing network of expensive contract editors to scale their output. This worked for a time, but as their volume continued to grow, collaboration and review between remote editors, project managers, stakeholders, and BMWL’s clients became a siloed, slow process across a jumbled mess of tools.
An inefficient production and review process
As the primary producer for these videos, Lia spent weeks (and oftentimes months) coordinating production and review cycles for each video, relaying files between clients and editors in Slack, cloud storage tools, email, and everything in between.
This confusion cost the BMWL team time and money: inefficient review processes took longer than they needed, projects were delayed, and work was left on the table because the team didn’t have a toolset that allowed them to meet the volume of their incoming video projects.
Creating clearer production guidelines with Scenery
As Lia evolved and managed through these workflows, she wanted to find a way to more clearly direct the work of her contract editors and reduce the number of review cycles from start to finish.
Thankfully Scenery came into the picture for Lia at just the right time, providing her an easy way to clearly and explicitly guide her contract editors and reduce the need for review at the start of the project. After some trial and experimentation, Lia and the team adopted the following workflow:
- Curate and organize footage in Scenery. Producer uploads source files to Scenery and marks selects to be used in edit.
- Create stringout in Scenery. Producer builds stringout of video in Scenery’s timeline with shots and timing they want to see in the edit.
- Share link with editor. Producer shares project link with remote editor to communicate exactly what sequence they want to see in their initial edit.
- Stringout exported to Premiere. Editor exports this timeline from Scenery to Premiere Pro via XML, along with subclips specified by producer for finishing edits and animation additions from After Effects.
- Review rough cut in Scenery. Editor uploads finished edit to Scenery for review.
- Internal review and approval. Producer approves v1 in Scenery, shares with internal stakeholders to green light for final editing and polishes.
With this new workflow, there are significantly fewer review cycles between the producer and contract editors, since their instructions at the start of the process are clear and explicit, the project can be easily shared with a link, and updated over time in a shared source of truth.
