Real People, Real Stories

Creative Strategy & Nimble Production

At Revelator, we ultimately consider ourselves storytellers. Sure, we help brands with ideation, strategy, and production, but that workflow always honors the story first. Showing the emotional impact and benefit found in each story is the backbone of our creative plan. We think it’s why our clients keep asking us to deliver nimble and creative video content over a variety of platforms. 

No brand is the same and no story is the same. Which is why we thought it might be helpful to break down the creative development strategy we created for our clients at HFE, a company with an entertainment portfolio connected by all of the stories below.

The video campaign creation and execution for HFE included research about our client’s portfolio, discussion with their stakeholders, and initial homework about the stories you’ll see and people you’ll meet below.  After this first phase of research, our team travelled around the country to conduct field research and meet the people and explore their worlds. This research would ultimately help us craft our final campaign strategy pitch to HFE. These were tightly-scripted storylines and biographies of the folks in each of our proposed stories. Upon approval we created a production plan that scheduled each step of the project’s journey. We were able to lay out a detailed schedule for our client, from the first day of filming, through each post production edit approval, and on through a comms execution on each of their media channels. Enough talk, let’s get to the stories.

Harlem Globetrotters: The Jersey

Our header video is the social promo the story about Michael. The just above is the long-form story that follows Michael, a young boy who is struggling to find his place in the world. He discovers, through the help of the Globetrotters and his mom, that he already belongs. It’s also the story of a single mother struggling to make the best life for her son in a world that can be seen as unfeeling and uncaring. Finally, it’s the story of an organization that goes out of its way to change the life of one boy and make their community and our world a slightly better place through a small and simple gesture. It’s about empathy, strength, and perseverance… and an encouragement for all of us to step slightly outside of our boundaries in order to help others. 

The creative ideation process for this story was based on some media that already existed. The Globetrotters visited Michael’s school, and that visit was captured on low res video. Revelator needed to create a content development strategy that balanced pre-existing media and our new documentary story. This creative strategy involved a copywriting message to present our media, and an execution strategy around how our longform stories would be cut down into promotional clips to motivate viewers to view the longer video. The Harlem Globetrotters shared the story on their social media channels during National Anti-Bullying Month as an example of their work across the country to stop bullying. They’ve visited 1,600 schools over the past eight years, teaching anti-bullying curriculum and providing help to those who are having a tough time. We felt luck to play a small role in sharing one of their anti-bullying stories.

Wave Foundation

The story of the Wave Foundation is the story of how the Newport Aquarium is working with elementary school students in the region to facilitate a love for the environment while fostering critical thinking. It’s easy to say that WAVE brings science to life, but the real goal is to teach values: respect for themselves, respect for others and respect for the environment. This is a short documentary about how a small aquarium in landlocked Kentucky is making huge ripples across the region and the world in regard to environmental conservation. Unlike the Globetrotters or the SDC Flood story below, the ideation process with our client involved telling a larger story. There isn’t just a single thread or subject that we would follow along a story arc. Rather we would show how the Wave Foundation enacts this philosophy across the schools they work and follow the current pursuits of past students who have been effected by the program. This copywriting and video content development centered around Wave’s amazing impact across the spectrum within the Kentucky and Cincinnati region.

The Flood

SDC asked Revelator to create a short film that embodied the company’s ethos of community.  Because this was one of the company’s priorities, they had literally hundreds of stories of employees helping employees. Our job was to sort through and find the one that best told the story in a visually compelling way.  After a focused research phase , we settled on the story of Joyce and how the SDC community came together after her house was flooded in 2017.   We visited the story stakeholders to research and plan a fairly straightforward content development strategy in terms of the timeline and the interviews with those involved. We loved this story and couldn’t wait to make it into a short film for our client. The thing that makes this one stand out is the fact that a large number of employees became involved when they realized that Joyce needed help… even though Joyce never asked. It also reveals the culture of leadership for our client in a true and heart-felt way: people wanted to help. And, finally it shows how the client’s Share it Forward program, which is a more institutionalized version of this culture, can kick into gear and make a huge difference. In the end it’s a great story of employees looking out for each other and using the tools created for such emergency situations. We were honored to help bring this story to life, along with our client’s entire brand campaign.