Project kitchen: how we did the video for Mail.Ru

    Hello, Habr!


    My name is Nastya, I am a brand manager of Mail.Ru Mail. I decided to tell how we shot a commercial about our mail. I want to share with you details about the “inside out” of the process, about how the video was conceived and created. Perhaps someone will find my experience interesting and useful, and also help to avoid some mistakes.

    A million years ago In the middle of last year, we decided to make a video about the Post to tell in it about the changes that are happening to it.


    Roller



    And a lot of things happened: after all, we finally sent the focus of attention to the Post that it deserves - we assembled a strong team and began to light: completely updated the interface design, did a lot of work to increase speed and fight spam, actively developed the ability to change topics clearance and much more.

    To our great regret, the audience of the “Internet” for the most part does not read press releases and niche industry media, so it was not so easy to convey to it information that we are changing rapidly and for the better. So the idea was born to shoot a good fashion video so that, so to speak, in a simple accessible form ...

    First, we decided to "turn to the professionals." To create a creative concept, we involved one well-known Moscow Agency. The agency thought for a long time, made two approaches to the "shell" and in the end gave birth to a concept for us that "we have already seen somewhere." It was built on the old as a word play Mail Mail.Ru = Soap. The agency suggested “Lather your gigabytes” (it could become a meme, yes), convinced that “you won’t get bored with soap” (attached was a picture that depicted soap with a hole in the middle ... “we can be slightly frivolous, it's the Internet!” ... .brrr), and so on and so forth.

    True, how soap could be friendly, stylish and modern (namely, we asked to withstand such a tone of the video) they could not explain to us.

    Then we decided to involve many, many professionals in the task and announced a tender in which several agencies agreed to participate at once, some of which were even larger, international and respected than the first.

    We told everyone the same thing: the video should be that the mail is changing and getting better, that a lot of important and useful features have appeared lately. And we want to tell this simply and in a friendly manner, without pathos and flirting with the audience.

    As many as seven agencies brought us their concepts - some of them were funny, some were cute, some were quite suitable for the concept of "modern." We even conducted a survey within the company - we asked our colleagues to look at them with a fresh, unencumbered look.

    But, frankly, the soul did not lie to any of them.

    What did we miss?


    Many concepts could be called worthy if we were not an Internet company, but say, we produced yogurt, chewing gum or dishwashing detergent. In each concept there was something that we see on TV every day (or we saw it before when we watched it :)).

    In the concepts there were small intelligent creatures (three species) that were responsible for the operation of our digestive mail system . And two forever opposing cities that used different detergents, mail services. There were also charming cartoon birds, similar to Twitter and to the English birds at the same time (this was the most modern concept). And even the BOX, in which, like in a black hole, it was possible to suck the whole world around.

    But all this seemed to us somehow false. All this was not about the Internet, not about technology, not about the changes that we wanted to talk about, not about our team, in which we are trying to hire only young and smart IT professionals. In a word, not about what we ourselves live.

    And then it dawned on us - no one better than ourselves can tell what we want to tell.

    After all, any Internet project is primarily the people who create it, so why the hell should singing hamsters or a blue box on our behalf?

    No one can tell better and more correctly about Mail than the one who constantly works with it, we decided, which means that the main characters of the videos should be Mail.Ru employees themselves.

    In addition to the obvious idea that we should represent our work, a second auxiliary meaning was born: an employee of Mail.Ru is the very advanced user who for most people is a source of information about new technologies and an adviser when choosing services on the Internet, so his words from the screen will sound much more convincing than the tweets of cartoon birds.


    Further, the remaining parts of the puzzle formed by themselves - we carefully re-read our brief, which we gave the agencies: in a friendly manner, without pathos and flirting with the audience, to talk about what we are changing, about new features ... That is, we should not dress a person in a business suit or clown trousers, should not try to make a joke sparkly or stand on his head in the frame, just tell honestly and it is desirable to show - what could be easier!

    Casting


    The thing remained “for little” - to find a movie hero inside Mail.Ru (we dismissed the idea of ​​hiring an actor a la “pharmacist Maria” immediately and irrevocably).

    In a company where the majority are programmers and product managers with a “technical background”, finding those who are well-kept in the frame, and even willing to break away from work to star in a movie is not a trivial task.

    To create a long list of candidates, I used an effective marketing tool - interviewing the female part of the team%)

    Exclusively for Habr video from the casting



    Casting was successful - we chose Alexei, he spoke well, looked great in the frame. According to the director, Alexey was our great success and worked on the site better than other professional actors.


    Movie shooting


    Oh yes, a little earlier we found ourselves a production, i.e. the company that took up the shooting of our video. We turned to a few, but almost all of them expressed surprise that we came to them directly, and not through an agency, and we did not have a clear script with a storyboard in our hands. Only one of them found a responsive and understanding director who took on short notice to help us not only with the shootings, but also with the script. And the director, by the way, turned out to be just great.

    As it turned out, in order to shoot one 30-second movie, you must:
    • To buy all the blue t-shirts in all the shops of the city to choose the only one in which the main character will be removed,
    • Make 10 options for applying a logo and a QR code on t-shirts to decide on the set which looks better in the frame;
    • About thirty people on the set, starting with the director, cameraman and producer, ending with such monofunctional characters as a girl who claps in a clapperboard or aunt who prepares tasty food and tea for everyone during the shoot.


    For me personally, the revelation was:
    • That the video will be filmed at the Center.Nauch.Filme;
    • That the pavilion is a huge, very cold and very dusty room, in which only a tiny spot is illuminated, where the shooting takes place;
    • What is so hot under the spotlights that the make-up constantly strove to drain Lesha, and he had to be corrected all the time;
    • Well, and most importantly, to shoot a 30-second clip you need 12 hours of shooting! And this, believe me, is a very long time even for those who simply observe the process! Oh yes, at first we wanted to shoot 3 videos, not one, but that's another story.






    And now the conclusions that I personally made for myself, having gone through this process (this is my personal opinion, which I in no way impose on anyone):
    • RA Choice - For an online brand, working with large traditional advertising agencies is difficult, time consuming and, unfortunately, quite inefficient. They are too “tuned” for the creation of advertising for consumer goods and it is difficult to tear them out of this paradigm. I’m not saying that you always need to invent everything yourself, but in the future I’ll prefer younger, more Internet-oriented studios and agencies.
    • Production - guaranteed to be good production, with the works of which it’s not a shame to get up on TV - it’s quite an expensive pleasure. Few top companies want to shoot one 30-second video for less than 2 million rubles. At the same time, you can shoot a good video much cheaper, but for this you need to have a certain set of knowledge and connections (for example, at the faculties of VGIK) and have enough time in reserve to start all over in case of failure.
    • The character from the company is very cool, but rather complicated. Although now I am an ardent apologist for advertising Internet projects with real human faces, I admit that you may well have a situation where the geniuses from your team are not at all photogenic.
    • Organization - I will say briefly: even if you paid a lot of money, as it seems to you, do not hope that everyone will do perfectly for you! Be sure the costume designer will buy a blue T-shirt, not blue, and post-production (this is another company that usually subcontracts production and does computer graphics) will report that “we didn’t agree” to draw all the screenshots, and they imagined spam as flying words, but they won’t draw “bugs and molecules”.
    • Timeline - two months passed to create the video (from the storyboard to the master), which is 2 weeks more than we thought according to the most pessimistic forecasts.
    • Separately, about post-production - be sure to carefully monitor this process, meet with them along with the main contractors and speak everything to the smallest detail.

    And yes, thanks to the director Konstantin Maximov, we will be happy to work with him again if the opportunity presents itself.

    Thank you for reading to the end!

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