Startup Video Production

background on The Brief

Startup video production is one of our favourite things. We love getting involved with early stage companies. Especially ones that explain their value prop and we go, “oh yeah, I can’t believe that doesn’t exist”. We want all of our clients to succeed but never more so than when a company is starting out. Much like a recent piece of work startup video for tech company Yodeck. We’d known about tiney, a registered B-Corp from the very beginning through friends but we were pleased as punch when they asked us to produce startup films for them. “Re-inventing childcare” is a bold and important mission (more on missions here) and we’re pretty thrilled to be asked to explain and promote it. Tiney is, through multiple funding rounds now, on its way to making childcare more convenient and more affordable as well as fulfilling the promise of all the science that says good early years childcare is a singular factor in improving outcomes in later life. We were asked to create a film that explains tiney’s mission and value proposition, improved brand awareness, paid ad performance, and conversions. The founders of tiney have an extraordinary startup pedigree, having started Teach First and Graze, so we were keen to get this right. Drawing on our other experience of producing videos for startups we got to work.
toddler playing with toys from startup video production by Vermillion Films - Video Production Birmingham

Never work with children or animals

The Approach

working with kids is actually brilliant

tiney’s approach to blended childcare settings that combine the training, due diligence and support of a nursery with the focused attention and personal experience only available in a home environment meant that we would always be filming in active tiney nurseries with children somewhere nearby. Filmmaking law, and lore, suggest this is a bad idea. The locations were a real mix of spaces, large and small, tidy and… actually, they were all lovely homes, full of warmth, love and creativity. We made a choice early on not to try and keep the kids out of the shot. Life is messy and kids are fun, so there’s more than one interview that features a toddler climbing up an interviewee or the noise of an impromptu drum session in the background.

One of the reasons why we like this so much is its proof that even with unusual conditions you can create interesting work. We did so by sticking to the principles of solid corporate video that we’ve laid down here.

A small child with a woolley hat on is holding his hand to the camera. It is covered in paint. By video production company Vermillion Films in Birmingham and London

Editing

Obviously having children climb on your interviewees can make the post-production process trickier. Often with interviews, we’ll be taking the beginning of one take and putting it next to the end of another take. This looks weird if a toddler disappears halfway through, so we had some work to do to ensure the interviews worked.
 
We also made sure to record the sounds of the play as well, so that if we did have a drumkit happening off-screen in the first half of a take, we could add it into the background of the second half.

results

How did the startup video production process go for tiney? The results, measured in engagement and conversion rates were “better than expected”. Given that they’re a very slick and well-managed organisation we’re pretty happy with that. BBC news also picked up the story and interviewed co-founder Brett Wigdortz using this film to lead into it and for cutaways.
 
On top of the main film we also provided tiney with separate films of each interview as well as shorter social media cutdowns. Also, the films went down very well with investors during tiney’s most recent round of investment.
 
If you want to read Chief Product Officer John’s full testimonial you can find it here.
 
Quote symbol by Vermillion Films Video Production Birmingham

We were impressed by how Vermillion were extremely efficient throughout the project. Their adaptability to get what we wanted during covid shooting restrictions and an extremely high quality product that was exactly to brief was most impressive.
The videos were particularly well received by larger investors during our recent round.

John Newbold – Chief Product Officer

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