We had two hours to film Croatia’s ambassador to the US across three locations in Old Town Alexandria, timed to announce Alexandria as Croatia’s FIFA World Cup 2026 base camp. No do-overs, no extra day if something went sideways.
This was never going to be a word-for-word scripted announcement, since that would have stripped out exactly what made it worth watching. BUT high-profile speakers like an ambassador and a city CEO bring their own version of the same problem. They are excellent on camera, comfortable, well spoken, and they can also talk for a long time if you let them.
So the real prep work was not storyboarding shots, it was building specific, dialed-in questions and prompts for both the ambassador and Visit Alexandria’s CEO that would get real, usable answers without opening the door to a ten minute tangent we did not have time for.
With the questions locked and a tight schedule mapped in advance, we moved the crew across three different spots in Old Town Alexandria inside a two hour window. There was no buffer built in for a delay or a reset, the plan had to hold up in real time, on a day tied to a fixed announcement date we could not push back.
Normally, narrowing hours of interview footage down to the exact statements worth keeping takes weeks of back and forth between our editors and the client. This project could not wait weeks, the video had to be live before the World Cup itself started.
So we used AI to do a first pass, narrowing forty minutes of footage down against the key points we had already locked in during pre-production. That turned weeks of back and forth into a single day. From there, our editors took over to actually shape the storyline, since narrowing footage down to the right talking points and building something that plays like a real story are two different jobs, and the second one still needs a person doing it.
The final cut came in just under three minutes, built to announce a genuinely major moment for the city on a timeline that gave us almost no margin for error, and it shipped before the World Cup started. This is the same caliber of high-profile, high-stakes production we bring to federal contractor and association work across the DC area.
See how we approach corporate video production, or our event videography page.