Mini-Documentary Social Media Series

The Challenge

Her Story Unveiled (HSU), a non-profit founded to share remarkable stories of women from a plethora of diverse backgrounds, was searching for a way to share those stories through social media (primarily Instagram). The challenge came in condensing the hours of research and interviews that went into each story/article into a sub-90 second video while maintaining an authentic representation of each subject.

The Solution

To accomplish these goals, I pitched a produced a series of "mini-documentary" style videos that highlighted each subject's individual story through their own words. Each video was centered around a video interview with the subjects. To limit the length of the videos, I worked with the HSU team to narrow down on the most impactful questions to ask. I also instructed each subject on how to keep their responses brief while allowing them to respond in their own words to preserve authenticity.

As the aim of this series was to be educational and inspirational, I decided against the overly fast-paced style of most social media content. However, to keep the videos interesting, I interspersed the interviews with b-roll footage and either cut between different camera angles on the interviews or used different levels of digital zoom to simulate a second angle. This allowed me to keep the visuals engaging while still keeping the overall story pace slow.

The Results

The resulting content series proved to be both educational and engaging. Each video averaged over 150 likes and 2500 views with the top performing piece of content getting over 600 likes. The content style also served as a departure from traditional social media optimized content and differentiated HSU by developing their brand identity further.