Kitchen of the project: how we made a video for Mail.Ru mail

Hi, Habr!

My name is Nastya, I am a Mail.Ru Mail account manager. I decided to tell you how we shot a commercial about our mail. I want to share with you details about the "wrong side" of the process, about how the video was conceived and created. Perhaps someone my experience will seem interesting and useful, and also help to avoid some mistakes.

A Million Years Ago In the middle of last year, we decided to make a video about the Post in order to tell it about the changes that are happening to it.

Roller

And a lot of things happened: after all, we finally sent the focus of attention to the Post, which it deserves - gathered a strong team and started to light: completely updated the interface design, did a lot of work to increase speed and to combat spam, actively developed the ability to change themes design and more.
')
To our great regret, the audience of the “Internet” for the most part does not read press releases and niche industry media, so it was not so easy to convey to her the information that we are changing rapidly and for the better. So the idea was born to make a good image video, so that, so to speak, in a simple accessible form ...

At first we decided to “turn to professionals”. To create a creative concept, we attracted a well-known Moscow Agency. The agency thought for a long time, made two approaches to the “projectile” and eventually gave birth to a concept for us that “we have already seen somewhere”. It was built on the old as the world word game Mail.Ru = Soap. The agency offered “Lather your gigabytes” (could become a meme, yes), convinced that “You do not get bored with soap” (a picture was attached that showed a soap with a hole in the middle ... “we can be slightly frivolous, it's the Internet!” ... .br), and so on and so forth.

True, how soap could be friendly, stylish and modern (it was precisely the tone of the video that we asked to endure), they could not explain to us.

Then we decided to bring in many and many professionals to the task and announced a tender in which several agencies agreed to participate, some of which were even bigger, international and respected than the first.

We told everyone the same thing: the video should be that the mail is changing and getting better, that many important and useful features have appeared lately. And we want to tell it simply and friendly, without pathos and flirting with the audience.

As many as seven agencies brought us their own concepts - some of them were funny, some were cute, some were quite suitable for the notion of “modern”. We even conducted a survey within the company - we asked our colleagues to look at them with a fresh, open-eyed look.

But, frankly, the soul did not lie to any of them.

What did we lack?

Many concepts could be called worthy if we were not an Internet company, but let's say we produced yogurt, chewing gum or dishwashing detergent. In each concept there was something that we see on TV every day (or we saw it earlier when we watched it :)).

In the concepts were small intelligent creatures (three species), who were responsible for the work of our digestive system mail. And two ever-opposing cities that used different detergents postal services. There were also charming cartoon birds, similar to Twitter and Engry Birds at the same time (this was the most modern concept). And even a BOX into which the whole world around could be sucked into a black hole.

But all this seemed to us somehow false. All this was not about the Internet, not about technology, not about the changes that we wanted to talk about, not about our team, in which we try to hire only young and smart IT professionals. In a word, not about what we live by ourselves.

And then it dawned on us - no one better than ourselves can tell what we want to tell.

After all, any Internet project is first of all the people who create it, so what the hell should sing singing hamsters or a blue box say on our behalf?

No one can better and more accurately talk about Mail than the one who constantly works with it, we decided, and this means that the protagonists of the commercials should be Mail.Ru employees themselves.

In addition to the obvious thought that we ourselves have to present our work, a second, auxiliary meaning was born: the Mail.Ru employee is, after all, that very advanced user who for most people is a source of information about new technologies and an advisor when choosing services on the Internet, so his words from the screen will sound much more convincing than the tweets of animated birds.


Then the remaining parts of the puzzle formed themselves - we carefully re-read our brief, which we gave to the agencies: friendly, without pathos and flirting with the audience, to tell about what we are changing, about the new features ... Ie we should not dress a person in a business suit or clown harem pants, should not try to joke or stand up on the head in the frame, just tell honestly and it is desirable to show what could be easier!

Casting

The matter remained “for small” - we found the hero of the video inside Mail.Ru (the idea of ​​hiring an actor a la “pharmacist Maria” was shallowed off immediately and irrevocably).

In a company where programmers and product managers with a “technical background” make up the majority, it’s not a trivial task to find those who are well-kept in the frame, and even ready to break away from work to play a little rabbit.

For the formation of a long list of candidates, I used an effective marketing tool - a survey of the female part of the team%)

Exclusively for Habr video from casting



Casting was a success - we chose Alexey, he spoke well, looked great in the frame. According to the director, Alexey was our great success and worked on the site better than other professional actors.

Shooting video

Oh yeah, a little earlier we found a production, i.e. the company that took up shooting our video. We turned to a few, but almost all of them expressed surprise that we came to them directly, and not through an agency, and we don’t have a clear storyboard on hand. Only one of them had a sympathetic and understanding director who, in a short time, undertook to help us not only with the shootings, but also with the script. And the director, by the way, turned out to be just great.

As it turned out, in order to make one 30-second video you should:

• Buy all the blue T-shirts in all the shops of the city to choose the one in which the main character will be shot,
• Make 10 options for applying a logo and a QR code on t-shirts to decide which one looks better in a frame;
• About thirty people on the set, starting with the director, cameraman and producer, ending with such monofunctional characters, like a girl who claps a party or an aunt who prepares delicious food and tea for everyone.

For me personally, the revelation was:

• That the filming will take place on Tsent.Nauch.Filme;
• That the pavilion is a huge, very cold and very dusty room in which only a tiny section is lit, where the shooting takes place;
• That under the spotlights so hot that the makeup constantly strived to drain from Lesha, and he had to be corrected all the time;
• And most importantly, for shooting a 30-second video you need 12 hours of shooting! And this, believe me, is very long, even for those who are just watching the process! Oh yeah, at first we wanted to make 3 videos, not just one, but that's another story.

And now the conclusions that I personally made for myself after going through this process (this is my personal opinion, which I in no way impose on anyone):

• The choice of RA - For an online brand, working with large traditional advertising agencies is difficult, time consuming and, unfortunately, rather inefficient. They are too “sharpened” under the creation of advertising for consumer goods and they are difficult to pull out of this paradigm. I’m not saying that you always have to invent everything yourself, but in the future I would prefer younger, more Internet-oriented studios and agencies.
• Production - guaranteed good production, with the works of which it is not a shame and to get up on the TV is quite expensive. Few of the top companies want to shoot one 30-second video for an amount less than 2 million rubles. At the same time, you can make a good video much cheaper, but for this you need to have a certain set of knowledge and connections (for example, at VGIK faculties) and have enough time left to start all over again in case of failure.
• The character from the company is very cool, but quite difficult. Although now I am an ardent apologist for advertising Internet projects with real human faces, I admit that you may well have a situation when geniuses from your team are not photogenic at all.
• Organization - I will say briefly: even if you paid a lot, as you think, money - do not expect that they will do everything perfectly for you! The costumer will definitely buy a blue T-shirt, not blue, and post-production (this is another company that is usually subcontracted from production and is engaged in computer graphics) will say that “we didn’t agree” to draw all the screenshots, and they could imagine spam as flying words, but "bugs and molecules" will not draw.
• Deadlines - it took two months to create the video (from the storyboard to the master), which is 2 weeks more than we thought it was according to the most pessimistic forecasts.
• Separately, about postproduction - be sure to carefully monitor this process, meet them together with the main contractors and pronounce everything to the smallest detail.

And yes, thanks to the director Konstantin Maximov, we will be happy to work with him again if the opportunity presents itself.

Thank you for reading to the end!