Media & Branding Behind the Scenes
For the past months, our Media & Branding sub-department has been working hard on our 10th anniversary TR-X video series! In these videos we take a look at every aspect of our team from the past ten seasons! This project is an excellent example of how we work together within the Media & Branding sub-department. This Open Alliance post will talk about how we regulate and maintain the branding of our team, using this project as an example.
Organising & regulating our department
Our Media & Branding sub-department currently consists of six team members. Within the team, our task is to keep our socials up-to-date. Besides this, we also take care of a lot of other projects. This is everything branding-related from flyers to posters to videos. We make sure that everything is organised and put into practise!
Every team member within our department has a role, for example: creating concepts, filming, editing and sorting and archiving our photos and videos. Normally, every Monday and Wednesday we work on these projects.
For our social media, we have agreed on posting three times a week. This can differ depending on which part of a season it is, we normally post more in the buildseason then in the off-season. To plan and organise these posts, we make use of a content calendar. For every part of the season, a different content calendar is made. Within this calendar, we can easily see what should be posted when, who is responsible and the status of the posts.
Content Calendar of how it is right now.
We mostly fill out our content calendar a few weeks before the new part of a season starts. So during Off-Season, we created the content calendar for Pre-Season. We mostly get our inspiration from previous years, such as the team member posts the Opa Foss History posts or our annual partner posts. But we also think of new concepts from time to time by finding inspiration online.
Our content calendar is not only used for Social Media, but also for other projects. Every year we write down a list of different kinds of posts, photos, projects and videos that we already know we need to make for the upcoming year. These can be projects such as the REV review videos, our annual reveal video, weekly buildseason recaps and for example our TR-X notebook. This is also a nice tool for knowing when your deadline is.
TR-X Video Series and how we handle productions & projects
The TR-X video series is a concept that one of our team members thought of during the 2023 regionals last year. We wanted to promote our tenth season as Team Rembrandts while highlighting every aspect of the past ten years.
Pre-Production
Like we do for every project, we start brainstorming on a simple concept and work it out into a full production plan. We started by answering two very important questions: “Why are we making the video?” and “Who are we making the video for?” Our answers were: “To show off every aspect of our team” and “For a wide audience, every follower on our socials should be able to understand it with a minimal knowledge of FIRST”. With this information, we knew that the videos should be made in a short format, easily understandable with quick cuts for a nice attention flow and should obviously be filled with our recognizable orange branding. And so we came up with a format of ten videos, where four team members would each be asked four questions. The video should be in between about 1-2 minutes with a nice background music. After laying out the base format, we could divide the ten videos into ten different subjects. In the end, we came up with these ten:
- My FIRST Year
- My FIRST Volunteering
- The FIRST Year
- The FIRST Buildseason
- The FIRST Regionals
- The FIRST Worlds
- My FIRST Impact
- My First Impact
- My FIRST Crescendo
- My FIRST FIRST
- My FIRST series
The worked-out concept for these videos is run past our intern Media & Branding sub-department. For this, we use a different channel within Slack than our usual #Sub-department_Media&Branding. We do it this way to keep our “spam” divided from our more important messages to the team.
During the pre-production phase, we also make sure to plan everything that is needed for the filming day ahead. For this, we would send messages to team members who we think fit with the subject and ask them to take part in the video. We would send them the questions beforehand in a worked production plan and ask them to wear orange on the day of filming.
Production
For our production days we would work the same as with most of our review videos. Beforehand we make sure our cameras and microphones are fully charged and everything that we need is available at our buildlocation. We start with choosing which background we want in the video. For the TR-X series we chose between our office area, our workshop and the field. To prepare our location we place the camera on a tripod. We place our lamps from both sides of the interviewed person and we would place an extra orange light from the side.
Further we would pin the microphones to the collars of our team members. The microphone wire would be hidden underneath their t-shirt and they would place the transmitter in their pocket. This way the microphone is nice and cleanly hidden for the video. We would ask our team members to sit on top of a high chair and look at the Canon logo. This way they look in the direction of the camera, but never directly in the camera. Since this can give an eerie feeling to the viewer. Following, we would stand behind the camera and ask questions. We would work with the concept where one team member sits down and answers all three or four of the questions. Then we would pin the microphone to the next person etc.
Post-production
Within post-production one of our team members would edit the video. We mostly use the Adobe Premier Pro software for this. We would cut the video up into every suitable answer and then mark each person by colour. Then we would see which answer fits after which and add in music, the questions and our outro.
After the video, or any other post ever, is finished, we send it out to the team for review and feedback. For this, we use the same system as last year. For this review and feedback round to run as smoothly as possible, we use the “emoji system”. Within Slack, you can react to different emojis to different messages. This system also works in Discord or WhatsApp. If a team member has read the post, they react with the Blue Banner emoji. If the team member agrees with the video, flyer or post they react with the Foss Approval Face.
How to design
Within the Media & Branding Sub-department we do a lot of designing. We designed everything from our social media stories to our TR-X Notebook of last year. Our workflow of designing something is quite similar to how we film a video.
We often start by thinking of a concept and thinking of the questions of why and who we make this for. For example, if we take the TR-X Notebook, we start by thinking about why we were making this and for whom we were making this. This concluded with the fact that we wanted to make a book that from start to finish screamed “Team Rembrandts”. A book that covered everything of our 2023 season, from hardware to outreach, but also strategy and team building. The book should show our hard work and complicated robot in an easy simple understandable way. This way, not only our team was able to read it, but also our parents, friends and partners. For this, we started with the structure of the booklet and which subjects we all wanted to write about.
After this, we started the design process. We always start to google for inspiration. We will search for things such as “cool poster design” or “best flyer design”. Based on what we find, we will start designing.
For this notebook we wanted to make every page in the same style. This way you could see our team is connected with one big orange bloodline, even if our departments are so different. For this, we made sure that every page had the same layout. The information was added afterwards. However, during the further designing of the booklet, the layout did still change.
Adobe Creative Cloud
Currently we have two Adobe Creative Cloud licences that we use with four different team members. The apps we use the most for video editing are Premier Pro and After Effects. Within Premier Pro we edit all of our videos and we use After Effects for things such as our Safety Animation.
For the designing of Instagram posts, we used Photoshop and for the designing of Instagram stories, posters and our TR-X Notebook we used Indesign and Illustrator.
How to maintain a constant branding
Within Team Rembrandts we have a clear and orange branding. To make sure this branding vibrates back in every single piece of media we create we have created a Team Rembrandts Branding Guide. In this guide you can find our standard colours, the fonts we use and when and when to use and not to use our intro and outro on videos.
Further, all of our partner’s logos, the FIRST season logos and our logos, fonts and colours can be found on our Notion page.
The #TeamREV Challenge
This year again we are participating in the #TeamREV Challenge. REV Robotics is a well-known name within the FRC Community. They make a lot of great products such as their swerve modules, their new REV NEO VORTEX and their new NEO SPARK FLEX. Last year REV started with the #TeamREV Challenge and this year it is back. Within this challenge, you can gather points by completing different challenges. Last year we made some awesome review videos about different REV products and this year we will continue these!
Further every month we make sure to use our #TeamREV hashtag under every post we make and we show off our volunteering work at FTC on our stories! REV cares about these initiatives where you help other FRC or FTC teams and support them by giving points for it!
REV Robotics offers us a lot of Media and branding opportunities through this challenge and we are grateful to be #TeamREV once again this year!
What are some tips we can give to teams who want to expand their branding?
- As said in our previous post, start on time! Planning and organising is one of the most important things in our department. The better a post or project is planned, the easier it will to put the project into practice
- Use Google for inspiration. We never start designing a poster, flyer or story post without looking for inspiration first. Starting from zero is almost impossible and looking up other posters or flyers of which you already like the design saves up a lot of time! Take inspiration from what you love and convert it into something with your style and branding. Don’t try to re-invent bread when you’re already sold on focaccia (or any other type of bread!)
- When starting with posting regularly on your social media, it’s smart to plan things. Start by taking 15 minutes every week to make a post about what you have been doing that week. From this, you can lay a base for maybe posting two times a week or maybe eventually even three times! We wouldn’t advise posting more than three times a week since this can easily be too much.
- Engage as much as possible with other teams online! This will expand your network around you. You can do this by tagging other teams (if they appear in your post) or by using hashtags such as omgrobots or #2024Crescendoseason.
And if you’ve got something FIRST-related to share, it’s always a great idea to let @First_official know! - Keep your stuff well organised! Keep all of your different layers or maps within your project named and organised. Keep it so organised that, when at any given moment you can not finish the project, someone else can!
Future Steps
We will keep our Media & Branding department running smoothly as it is now, trying to produce the best content we can!