The launch of Bear Content has seemingly coincided with the world beginning to open up again.
In the spirit of opening up, and after a year locked away, I’ve decided that this would be the perfect time to emerge from my editing suite and open up a little myself.
I thought I would take this opportunity to talk through the creation of our brand showreel. What follows is an attempt to lift the lid on approaching my work with a creative eye. I want to show how I – even in the subtlest of ways – inject a bit of my personality into that work.
Anyone can create a simple montage of clips, but the key to a good showreel is to let your brand and ethos pop on-screen.
As a smaller team, in the future, Bear Content can become the vehicle for our personalities to be at the forefront of our brand identity.
The showreel that I created to signpost this new chapter in each member of the team’s lives had to illustrate what we do as a business and showcase us as individuals.
Bears see in colour
Any fantastic showreel needs to capture attention within the first 5 seconds and establish a unique tone.
The lightning flashes and bursts of colour seen throughout the showreel may seem contrived at first, but I intended this as a striking visual metaphor to represent each team member.
In brainstorming sessions for the brand, we kept returning to the idea of lab work, experimentation, and alchemy – the genesis of all good ideas and innovation. The colour splashes, intermingling with one another, came from this; Martin the blue and Kathryn the pink.
(While the latter may seem like I’m typecasting Kathryn into the pink role, she’s a confessed pink fanatic and the very reason that we landed on the hot pink for our Bear Content logo!)
But every great idea needs a spark. This spark is where I (metaphorically) come into the frame—the lightning.
A brief history of what lead me to join Bear Content
Having worked in a retail environment whilst freelancing as a video editor (for over a decade), I began to grow tired of the daily grind. I sought out a new, more stable career in digital marketing.
After getting in touch with a digital marketing expert, she deemed that the only acceptable route for me to take at that time was to start from the very bottom and work my way up.
Long commutes to London and a sub-minimum wage seemed to be a certainty.
Despite my wealth of experience in editing promotional content for esteemed entities such as Emirates and British Airways in the ten years before I changed course, this seemed to be my fate – if I were to make a successful career for myself.
I was just about ready to give up.
However, the very evening that I received this advice, I saw a job listing for a role that (seemingly) fit the bill for me perfectly, and – as if the world heard my anguish at that looming London commute – the office was a mere 10-minute walk from my home.
I took the opportunity with both hands, got the job, and the rest is history.
That was almost two years ago.
To cut a long story short (and to pander to my lightning analogy), I tend to look back fondly at this opportunity as a natural ‘lightning-in-a-bottle’ moment for me; elusive, hard to predict, but incredibly fortunate.
And, once I joined, the work began to pick up the pace rapidly.
Back to the editing suite
As I mentioned before, the opening moments of any showreel need to grab your attention. And ours illustrates a (somewhat) amorphous representation of the three of us.
The two colours come together, and – once the lightning enters the equation – the video erupts into a montage of our vast body of work.
Sifting through the work that I’ve been directly involved with over my relatively short time here proved to be quite an emotional task.
To reflect upon and revisit the wide variety of projects that I’ve seen through to completion and the amazing feedback that we’ve received from our clients was a reward in itself.
To think that we’ve survived this tumultuous year and reinvented ourselves on the other side makes me immensely proud of myself and the team.
Roll credits
After the montage, the showreel eventually returns the three of us once more. This time, however, we’re on camera – front and centre – each with the essential accompanying text:
Martin – BE CLEAR – the clear blue; the vision and purpose.
James – BE CREATIVE – the spark that is necessary for creativity to start.
Kathryn – BE COLOURFUL – the personable pop of colour (the pink) that makes our content bespoke.
The final shot of our showreel is aimed directly at the viewer, with the message “Be Content”, eventually cross-dissolving into our logo. This element is empowering for both our clients and the team.
We strive to do great work for our clients to be content with the work that we deliver for them. Whilst also remaining content within ourselves, being proud of the skillsets that we each bring to the table and recognising our strengths accordingly.
This chapter in my life has been a golden opportunity that I won’t ever take for granted. I was given a chance that I couldn’t find elsewhere.
I’m sure that Kathryn and Martin feel similarly about Bear Content for their own reasons and this period of reinvention, but they’re at different stages in their lives, and their stories are vastly different from mine. I hope that they both explain the importance of Bear Content to them in their blog posts in the future.
In a (somewhat grey) post-Covid world, I think we can all agree that being content is a goal for all of us going forward in both work and life.
If we can all reach that goal with a pop of colour and a spark of creativity, then even better.
