Global Security Answers

Professor Rohan Gunaratna

Lights, Camera, Action!

Professor Gunaratna is a hugely successful professor in the field of national security. However he lacks a strong online presence. For the last 2 years he has been working with Lunar Yeti to give himself a stronger presence online by creating thought provoking videos on global national security questions.

Creative Challenge

The challenge was that while the professor is highly knowledgable, but extremely busy and doesn’t have time to film himself. Further he is not equipped to find the story or condense his huge volumes of knowledge into easily digestable and consumable ideas for social media.

Outcome

The results of our work with the professor on crafting narratively interesting almost documentary format in his content has garnered significant attention on various platforms such as twitter where he regularly generates a lot of discussion on his videos.

The Process

The professor is highly knowledgable and acclaimed world wide. He is also one of the hardest working people we have ever met. But he’s old school. Hes used to a world where you go to conferences and speak on stage to build credibility.

The fast paced world of Youtube and social media is a mystery to him. So we worked with him to figure out how we can capture his ideas in his slow, and sometimes convoluted manner and edit it to be suitable for the ever shrinking attention span of the online world.

Trailer for a series

Pre-Production

With the professor we aren’t able to have as detailed a pre-production as we would like because he’s insanely busy. So our pre-production starts with asking him what he will like to make a video about next.

We might even give a few suggestions if its hot off the heels of an event and we think more content will drive more engagement.

Once we have the topic area(s) down, we head back and construct a series of interview questions which will help us cover the entire topic + questions designed to help us in the editing room with crafting a compelling story.

We send that list to the professor ahead of time and get his approval. Once he signs off we book the studio for the shoot!

We also started using pre-vis (pre-visualization) for shoots. This is a new system of using 3D scenes to determine how to the scene will look and how to plan the lighting and props.

3D previs planning of studio shoot (model is placeholder for lighting reference)

Production

Once in the studio our goal is to make this look like a netflix documentary. Our interviewer is in position, we try our best to plan out as much as possible before we head to the studio.

Once we set up and are happy with the look of the scene we start the interview. The professor whizzes past each question and we are off to the races.

Episode in the series

Post-Production

Once we capture all the footage we head back into the editing room and start working on crafting the story. Usually with the professor we film upto 10 pieces of content in one sitting.

mini-documentary about Katchchateevu Island

We aim to create compelling pieces of video content that stays true to the professor’s brand image, while also delivering a story that we know YouTube will like.

The Results

The most important result is that the professor now has a consistent series of videos that flow out of his channels with his own views and knowledge. Overtime this has gained momentum and driven many people to reach out to him via the DMs.

But beyond that we see significant conversation around some videos like the one below on twitter with ouver 18,000 views.