Zen Moment in a Hurry

An important pitch to a Fortune 500 company. Fifteen minutes to convince them to spend millions of dollars with your magazine. How to create a Zen moment to draw the attention of a room of distracted executives to make them want to put their phones down? Show them a video with emotional pictures of smiling, hard working families, soothing music and a heartwarming narrative. Oh! And the client needs it for Monday morning in St. Louis. Did I mention it is now Thursday? Fortunately I have 15 years experience working with the magazine. The Executive Editor Dan M. and I have a sort of mind meld when it comes to digging deep and pulling rabbits out of our collective hats in previous years for various shooting and editing projects. We were able to pull together a collection of the best of the best photos. Dan wrote the story that I translated to words on the screen. Timed to some uplifting music, all floating and drifting across the screen. Choreographed succinctly to the flow of the arousing melody as it rose and fell, lulling the viewers into a receptive mood for the following dry, technical PowerPoint presentation. Oh, well. At least I could give them a zen moment. I spent the weekend burning the midnight caffeine, coaxing words, pictures and music to dance together until I uploaded a final version Sunday night at 10pm. On Monday I received the following text from the client:

Here is the video:

Here are the video frames from the show:

Photo credits: Jim Patrico, Dan MIller, Rob Lagerstrom