In addition to helping one client launch their video-podcast series on thought leadership, I had the opportunity this year to help another channel. FamilyBusiness.org is an online academic journal that is a free resource for family businesses of all shapes and sizes. Before this year, its YouTube channel had yet to break out in terms of visibility and a wide spread of content. That changed when the journal tapped me and several others to reboot its channel.

I was tasked with creating assets to be used across videos, including the videos linked below. I worked on these in Adobe After Effects, crafting an animated intro and outro, a like-and-subscribe animation, transitions, and a lower-thirds nameplate for introducing guests. Some assets like the transitions and nameplates required creating several possibilities for the client to choose their favorites. I also created special animations for individual videos, like a scrapbook of interview guests and a family tree of family business members.

Speaking of videos, my next step for the channel was taking these assets and combining them with voice-over, interview segments, stock footage, and music to create trailers. One trailer, “Welcome To Familybusiness.org,” introduced the channel itself, while another introduced a playlist on the channel (“Empower the Next Generation of Your Family Business”). I also created a third video from a pre-recorded interview with Six-Point Creative CEO & Co-founder Meghan Lynch. The interview itself remains untouched, but I implemented the split-screen background seen in the video and added B-roll and illustrative stock visuals.

Here are the results of my efforts:

I’d like to give a special thanks to Kim Eddleston (FamilyBusiness.org Editor-in-Chief) and Jennifer Gessner (EIX Editor) for their support and collaboration.

Click here to watch the video.

I was tasked by the University of St. Thomas to create videos highlighting teams that won startup funding at e-Fest: the yearly competition between student entrepreneurs. Team members of the Innovation Challenge and Social Impact Prize winner, ECGO (formerly known as Conserve), spoke with me in a recorded interview where I asked them about their business, the progress they have made since e-Fest, and how e-Fest 2022 helped them reach where they are now. Afterwards, I took the recording of the interview and mapped out the progression of a 3-minute video, one that followed a storyboard provided by my editor. Iterating upon the storyboard, I began placing clips of the interview where it made narrative sense, tying them together with transitions and b-roll taken at the 2022 festival. I also worked with ECGO to acquire further visuals, mostly taken from their social media. These I used to show off their progress since e-Fest, how they get involved at schools, and how their app works. I also ended up going over the video multiple times to tweak the length of clips and their arrangement, fitted to background music I found. Finally, I created a simple illustrative graphic in Adobe After Effects to showcase the ECGO app – using a background and app marketing video provided by the team.

It was a pleasure speaking and working with the talented entrepreneurs of ECGO. I wish them the best of luck with their bright future: making recycling easier than ever!

Click here to watch the video.

I was tasked by the University of St. Thomas to create videos highlighting teams that won startup funding at e-Fest: the yearly competition between student entrepreneurs. The Grand Prize and Global Impact Prize winner, HydroPhos Solutions, agreed to take a recorded interview with me. I asked the team about their business, the progress they have made since e-Fest, and how e-Fest 2022 made it possible to reach where they are now. Afterwards, I took the recording of the interview and mapped out the progression of a 3-minute video, one that followed a storyboard provided by my editor. Iterating upon that storyboard, I began placing clips of the interview where it made narrative sense, tying them together with transitions and b-roll taken at the 2022 festival. I also worked with the HydroPhos team to acquire further visuals. Tweaking the arrangement and length of clips, finding background music to fit the video’s progression, and creating a basic text motion graphic in Adobe After Effects, I eventually came away with the final version of the video.

It was a pleasure speaking and working with the talented entrepreneurs of HydroPhos Solutions. Many thanks to them and best of luck with their sustainable startup!

I’ve put together a number of videos for Entrepreneur & Innovation Exchange (EIX), including those that spotlight e-Fest: the yearly competition between student entrepreneurs looking to fund their startup ventures. The idea behind this particular video (one of four like it) was to spotlight the event itself: how the day is broken up, what the teams are doing, how much funding e-Fest has awarded, and so forth. It primarily featured the perspective of HydroPhos Solutions: the 1st place Grand Champion team from e-Fest 2022.

Putting the video together from start to finish required combing over an hour’s worth of B-roll, archival interviews with HydroPhos team members at the event, and dozens of photos. From there, I created the storyboard for a three-minute video that referenced these resources and organized them into a fluid narrative. I would iterate upon this storyboard several times and create multiple versions of videos following its progression. Sharing my progress with my employer, we came to a final version that we both liked, and this was the result! This video and the others in its series were produced entirely in Adobe Premiere Pro, where I trimmed footage, added transitions, inserted music, and fixed audio hiccups.

Many times the raw footage from a Zoom session needs to be edited down to just the points that matter. In this case, I worked with an hour-long discussion with four panelists who talked about their experiences selling their family business, hosted by the Family Business Center at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis.

I identified the seven most important takeaways from the discussion and organized segments of the video around those takeaways. The heavily edited, 14-minute video was published on FamilyBusiness.org, a journal that brings practical advice to family business owners. Take a look!

I produced several videos for the Schulze School of Entrepreneurship at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, which hosts e-Fest — an annual competition that pits teams of student entrepreneurs all over the U.S against one another. Winners earn a share of $215,000 to fund the startup they’ve envisioned. Each April the student finalists convene at the UST campus for the last round of competition, an exciting three days when they both compete against one another and network and learn from one another.

My role was to work with footage that a videographer took at this very lively and noisy event and create something that captures its energy and excitement. It was challenging because of all the background noise, but through the editing and music I strived to minimize the distracting parts, and the client was happy with the results. Here is one of about a dozen videos I produced.

Sometimes one long stretch of video footage can serve many purposes. My work with the “Everything Thought Leadership” video and podcast series usually involves three versions of a video interview: a trailer that previews it; the video itself and a podcast.

In this example, I was able to take an interview with Jim Wetherbe — a business professor, thought leader and highly sought-after speaker — and develop four versions of it. The full-length one (above) used the edited Zoom interview as well as “B-roll” pictures to make it more interesting, and “digressions” to explain background or concepts that were unclear or useful.

Variation #1: The Trailer

Before editing on the full-length video was completed I also developed a trailer for the it, which can be viewed below.

Variation #2: A Narrower Focus On One Key Topic

Another edited version of the video was useful for EIX, a client with whom Jim has worked. In this edited excerpt from the original video, Jim explains why businesses and academic researchers need to work together more closely to identify real-world business problems that need rigorous research to find answers, and improve the success rate of businesses.

Variation #3: The Podcast

With my work for “Everything Thought Leadership,” I always develop podcasts based on the video. This involves far more than just posting the audio version. It requires different editing and many times involves adding commentary that fills in for the missing visuals and helps the listener comprehend. I post the videos on SoundCloud and set up feeds to Buday TLP’s channels on Apple Music and Spotify.

External sources:
University of Memphis University Center Rotunda Entrance.jpg by Bubbahotepblues is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi… https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index…

Texas Tech University April 2022 29 (Seal of Texas Tech).jpg by Michael Barera is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi… https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Us…

University of Minnesota (2651542581).jpg by JOHN LLOYD is licensed under CC BY 2.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi… https://www.flickr.com/people/3210928…

“Brilliant Island” by Audiorezout is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 /Music overlapped to extend track length. https://freemusicarchive.org/music/au… https://freemusicarchive.org/music/au… https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…

I’ve worked with Entrepreneur & Innovation Exchange, a web site dedicated to improving the success rate of entrepreneur-led businesses, on several videos for a series entitled “Learn From Leaders.”

A few years before I did my work, EIX editors did one-on-one interviews with noteworthy founders and CEOs of groundbreaking companies. The interview subjects include Dick Schulze, founder and former CEO of Best Buy; Linda Hall, former CEO of MinuteClinic; Eddie Hartman, founder of LegalZoom; Scott Nash, founder of Mom’s Organic Market; Seth Goldman, founder of Honest Tea; Jeff Freeland-Nelson, founder of Yoxo Toys; and Ann Winblad, founding partner of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

Each of these videos was published on the EIX site, but we wanted to find a way to make them more focused. The “Learn from Leaders” concept focused on essential steps to launching a company, with each episode featuring the parts of the original videos that spoke to each theme: developing an idea, getting financing, building a team, advisors and mentors, and growing the company. My role was to pick out the relevant footage from each of the original interview videos and compile them by theme.

The first video focused on how ideas develop — and you will see that the process is not always neat or linear. That video was wildly popular, attracting more than 400,000 views and counting. It continues to be one of EIX’s most popular posts.

Explore the rest of the ‘Learn From Leaders’ series.