Legacy of FAIRWINDS

Each year, our CEO gives a "state of the union" presentation to the board for FAIRWINDS, and the previous year, I was asked to assist with his presentation. While the prior year was a storybook-themed PowerPoint, this was the year when he wanted to start going "bigger" on his presentation.

He asked me to create two videos. One would be a look into FAIRWINDS' future, and the other — this video — would be a retrospective on our past 75 years.

This project coincided with a period when I wanted to evaluate moving our creative team from Premiere Pro to DaVinci Resolve. I had been hearing great things about the tool and, most of all, I saw that it offered a better way to collaborate as a team on video projects.

The only problem was that I had years of muscle memory in Premiere and After Effects, but no real experience with this tool, which ditched layers for a node-based approach. It was a steep learning curve, and I knew that if I kept going back to Premiere just because I was under a deadline, I would never take the plunge and learn it — so I forced myself to use this video as my first real DaVinci Resolve project.

I didn't approach it lightly, either. I fell in love with the idea of taking an old commercial I had found of the company (before it became "FAIRWINDS") and compositing it to look like it was playing on an old CRT.

Some of it I could fake with layering sounds of VCR tapes instead of animating a tape itself, but I wanted to make sure I sold the TV even though all I could find through stock sites was a still photo. To achieve this, I utilized DaVinci's nodes to create a second instance of the video and transform it to make a reflection of light on the image of the table in front of it. I also had to do some clever editing the moment the commercial goes "full screen" since the push into the camera didn't line up perfectly.

Luckily, the other shots in the video were mainly Photoshop images with some simple push transitions that I set to what I felt was a fitting soundtrack.

The first version of this video was just text on screen and no voice-over. Since it was an internal video, the cost of hiring a voice-over artist wasn't in the cards for me, but while the CEO loved the concept of the video, he wanted it to have a voice-over after seeing the first draft.

This is how this video became another first for me: my first time testing AI-generated voice work. I had found out about ElevenLabs through a YouTube channel called Corridor Digital and decided to give it a shot. I settled on a very natural-sounding voice that I thought gave the story more character than most of the standard "news caster" style voices I had found. The tool had also allowed me to make quick changes to the video even days before the actual event.

I'm told that our HR department now uses this video as part of new hire training.