Making Of:
Livability in Virginia's New River Valley
Showcasing Why WE Love This Region
Working alongside staff from Onward NRV, our team collaboratively developed multimedia assets for use in a campaign that showcases the New River Valley and promotes the many reasons to live and work in the area.
During their one month campaign, these assets helped bring awareness, engagement, and business advocacy well beyond the region. Part of a 5-year strategic plan, this campaign generated 5,587 website visits, 297,404 video views in one month’s time, and reached nearly half a million users.
While this project and narrative model could be adapted for many other places, work like this is important to us because we’re close to it. We live and work here and truly wanted to show off why we love it.
These videos will be useful for years to come and will continue to be seen and promoted in many ways: online, at events, in advertising—the list is endless! Producing content like this is a long-term investment for marketing success.
Locations and Collaborators
Each host location met our crew and project collaborators with absolutely open arms.
Working with our production crew, municipalities, and businesses throughout the region to pull this off, work like this truly takes a village. Our team handles the coordination, narrative development, model recruitment, and production for projects like this one.
Municipal Partners
The many counties, cities, and towns in our region are always open to collaborations. Many thanks to those that welcomed us in for this project:
Town of Blacksburg
Town of Christiansburg
Floyd County
Giles County
Pulaski County
Montgomery County
Radford City
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We worked with Christiansburg Run Club for one quick shot that showcased community collaboration and the many activities available to NRV residents.
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We've worked with Lichen or Knot on a variety of projects over the years, highlighting retail's role in tourism and livability regionally. It was wonderful to film in their plant shop in Floyd, Virginia!
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Iron for Zion is a gym and fitness center located in Fairlawn, Virginia. The owner, Anthony Oretade, brought a level of energy and excitement that truly helped drive this whole project.
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Iron Tree Brewing Company is a visionary brewery, the first of its kind in Christiansburg, Virginia. They host a variety of community events and are excellent stewards of our community.
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Patrick Enterprises is a custom manufacturing, metal fabrication, welding, and machine shop located in Giles County, Virginia. They welcomed our crew and let us capture some truly unique drone content for this project.
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Troika Contemporary Crafts is an art studio in Floyd, Virginia. Alongside many retailers in Floyd, they lead the charge regionally for arts and tourism.
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Twisted Liquid is a fine dining restaurant located in Blacksburg, Virginia. They are truly elevating the food scene here locally with amazing food and cocktails in a small town environment.
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The Highlander is the region's newest premiere lodging and rooftop entertaining asset. They provide a truly unique experience to the New River Valley. We're grateful to help showcase that!
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Located in Dublin, Virginia, Red Sun Farms shows off beautifully the innovative nature of our region. A massive greenhouse with incredible automations, this truly helped showcase our region.
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The Virginia Tech CRC and CoGro Labs is an innovator incubator for businesses of all size in our region. It's always wonderful to work with them to showcase this region's potential.
Team Members
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Luke Brugh
Director, Lead Videographer
Luke took the lead on the filming and editing of this project. He was in charge of the set design and leaned on the rest of our team when he needed support.
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Devon Arnold
Assistant Videography, Drone Operator
Devon operated camera equipment at each location and took on the bulk of the b-roll and drone duties.
Devon also produced the vertical video for this project. She also helped produce custom graphics and logo bumpers for these assets.
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Cody Thompson
Project Manager
Cody organized filming dates, coordinated with small businesses, and ran all the logistics for this project.
This is a key differentiator for Aspire. We are adept at planning and execution of projects without much input from our customers.
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Jonathan Roberts
Lead Photographer, Behind-the-Scenes
Jonathan produced the still photography for this project. Capturing content at each event as well as filming behind-the-scenes content, he produced media throughout this project.
Special Considerations
The main difficulty with this project was simply the number of moving parts: organizing this many shoots with multiple models and everyone’s schedules is always a challenge. We don’t have the ability to put everything else on hold and film for days at a time—nor would that work with our collaborators.
It’s tough to organize the many aspects of a project like this with a small team. Work like this requires communication and processes in place. Those didn’t come quickly or easily for our team—it’s something we’ve developed over time.
Equipment
Main Camera: Panasonic EVA-1
Our workhorse cinema camera, the EVA-1 absolutely shines when it comes to work like this. Skin tones are incredible and this camera works well within our production workflow.
B-Cam: Panasonic Lumix S5
The first camera we purchased when we switched from Sony to Panasonic, the Lumix continues to performs well for us in a variety of situations. From second camera setups in interviews to b-roll capture, the Lumix is a versatile camera!
Stills: Panasonic Lumix S5
Another Lumix here, the full frame sensor and dual-native ISO really extends our ability to capture stills in many environments. Low light really isn’t much of an issue with this camera in our quiver!
Audio: Tascam DR-10L for on-Camera Interviews
Our go-to lavalier mic and recorder, this is what we use for most of our audio capture. Small, always hidden, and reliable!
Lighting: Aputure Light Storm 600x Pro
Our main light, the Light Storm is incredible. It hasn’t let us down even once and is so versatile with powerful, completely customizable light.
Delivery and Distribution
In addition to the video deliverables, our team captured stills during each event, as well as during some b-roll shoots with individuals and businesses.
Horizontal videos, vertical videos for social media, and still photography were all packaged and delivered to our client. In addition, supplemental files for thumbnails and captions were all put together to make distribution easier on the Onward staff.
Delivering quality assets throughout the whole process is crucial to success!
Lessons Learned
Typical logistical challenges came up; however, this project ran very smoothly because of the clear communication between the Aspire team and Onward NRV representatives.
In our region, this project was possible because of our existing network and connections here. Careful consideration will be made in the future for any projects we do of this scale in other places. Without a lot of eager collaborators, something like wouldn’t be nearly as successful.
Want to talk with our team?
We’re happy to chat if you’re interested in this work, answer questions about our process, or get started on a new project for you or your organization!