Brand Storytelling Digital Marketing

Ascend Active Apparel was an apparel company, focused on active individuals that want to cultivate a culture of excellence, focus and discipline.

Michael Boswell, who’s CEO of Ascend Active Apparel, approached us about wanting to make content for his brand. He was concerned about people not knowing who they were and what they stood for. The public’s perception of the brand’s values was very important to him. Furthermore, he said he was afraid that the public didn’t know their story well enough.

As a Brand Storytelling studio, we proposed that the brand needed a brand storytelling video. It’s a documentary-style promo video that highlights the founder’s story in the context of the creation of the company. They loved the idea and we got to work.

We first sat down for a pre-interview and asked preliminary questions about the company. What were their motivations, their inspirations; what drove them to start the company, and what they wanted their customers to feel when they purchased their product. These are just some of the questions that lead us to better understand their journey, and how we could best portray their mission and vision through a video.

We created storyboards of the story as we saw it, and submitted to the client. We also wrote down 5 keywords through which the project would be guided. The keywords were . These words guided us through creating the storyboards, and the storyline for the video.

We sat down with Sam and Michael, set up the interview set and got to ask them questions about their entire journeys leading up to the creation of the company, as well as their visions for the future. Our crew scouted the location for the one with the best background look for the interviews, then we got to work on setting up the three-point light setup, the microphone, both cameras and their tripods, as well as the chair for the interviewer and the interviewee.

The interview process lasted about an hour with each interviewee. The questions were deep and personal, and there was a clear understanding that we had accomplished our goal. We discussed so many interesting topics and we knew we would have a lot of powerful sound bites for the editing process. The post-production process for the video was the longest and most labor intensive we’d had so far. Our editor went through all 3hrs or so of interview footage, sorting out all of the good sound bites and arranging the story according to the storyboards we prepared in pre-production. One slight hitch was that, after finding all of the good parts of the interview, we decided that only one video explaining the journey of the creation of the company wouldn’t be enough. We then decided to make one video for each founder, so we could have more time and space to dedicate to fully explaining their own personal journey, and what led them to where they are. After both stories were well set up and almost finished, it was time to go after more b-roll to support the storylines we decided to include in the video. We received several old photos and videos from Michael and Sam that helped us illustrate their backstories. Our crew went out to get more b-roll and brought that to the editing room. From there, all we needed to do was finish the last details of the edit, such as transitions, fixing the audio and adding sound effects. Finally we took the time to properly color grade all the shots from both videos, and from there they were ready to be sent to the client.