Raising Fundraising Awareness With Video
As one of ten campuses at the University of California, UC Davis is home to more than 38,000 students. For over 100 years, UC Davis has offered a variety of majors in four colleges and six professional schools. It is recognized as one of the top public universities in the United States. The university is passionate about staying connected to their alumni. UC Davis recognizes their alumni, friends and supporters who further the university with philanthropic contributions in the amount of $50,000 or more through the Leadership Giving Society program. Each year, the society is recognized in a special event, and our event production team has been fortunate enough to be a part of this big movement for UC Davis.
In early 2018, our video production team was approached by UC Davis to develop an animated video to promote their “Big Ideas” campaign and also to create a video message from their Chancellor, Gary S. May. To achieve their event and video goals, we first strategized with their creative team to determine what message they wanted to showcase in this project. Our creative director worked in an advisory role to help UC Davis’ creative team develop a “flying through space” theme to highlight their overall campaign message. We also worked with an outside animation creator for their requested animated video.
For the big event in late September, our warehouse crew loaded up one of our semis and sent it out west along with seven of our production specialists. Once the truck and crew safely made it halfway across the country, we had plenty of setup to do. Not only did our team have to set up the video production, stage, sound and lighting, but the event design had to accommodate more than 400 guests in attendance. We got busy!
When UC Davis approached us with this project, they came to us with a very specific vision: they wanted us to project the videos we created onto the side of a beautiful Straloch Barn that sits on campus. For that, we used a video technique known as projection mapping. Our production design included two LED screens, a 4×8 stage for live acoustic performances, a full audio/sound engineering setup, 600 feet of LED bistro lighting, and two 30K high-resolution projectors for the custom projection mapping display on the barn itself.
The custom projection mapping display (also known as video mapping) was a fun and challenging project for our creative director and video production team. UC Davis’ creative team asked us to make the barn come to life with their videos before the Chancellor made his larger-than-life appearance in the barn display. We worked closely with them to create a video that mapped perfectly onto the barn itself and displayed the message they were looking to share with the audience in a captivating way.
As you can probably tell from videos, we love fun challenges from our clients! We also enjoy the opportunity to work collaboratively and watch events come to life — no matter the miles between us. The UC Davis Leadership Giving Society event was an amazing event production project. We enjoyed working with the staff at UC Davis and look forward to more amazing projects like this in the future.
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