Legacy of FAIRWINDS

Each year our CEO does a presentation to the board to give a sort of "state of the union" for FAIRWINDS — and the year prior to this I was asked to be involved in helping him present. While prior year was a storybook-themed PowerPoint, this was the year where 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 happened to align with a time that 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 I had years of muscle memory in Premiere and After Effects but no real experience in this tool that 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 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 feel in love with this idea for a shot where I would take an old commercial I had found of the company (before becoming "FAIRWINDS") and wanted to composite a shot where it looked 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 do this, I used DaVinci's nodes to make a second instance of the played video and transform it to create 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 camera didn't line up perfectly.

Luckily, the other shots in the video was mostly 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 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. A 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.