In my formative years as a producer I worked at a company called Dream World Studios — we were commissioned to create four videos for Toro to promote their genuine replacement parts. Toro replacement parts are tuned to perfection and cost more, where third party distributors make compromises in their production process and in return make cheaper replacement parts with lesser quality in terms of specs. Our mission was to help Toro craft this message for their customer base. We captured videos for mower blades, tines, genuine Toro fluids and air/oil filters.
We had a challenge as a company to create beautiful, engaging content that could help tell the story of Toro perfectly tuned replacement parts, but do it with a rigid budget. We had a tight turnaround to deliver all these videos on the needed timetable for Toro and their partners. In addition to coordinating with Toro to get their genuine replacement parts delivered to us for a studio shoot (we had to get super creative and MacGyver interesting ways to showcase the products in our studio) , we had to coordinate with golf courses to film them actually using the Toro parts on their equipment. It was a lot to coordinate in a short window, but ultimately worked out seamlessly.
After all the videos were approved by our Toro client, we had to translate the video in 10 different languages. All the videos were delivered with voiceover, meaning a narrator talking over the Toro video content we captured. As the producer on the project I had to facilitate and oversee the acquisition of ten different voiceovers, ranging from Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese and more.
The process started with auditions for each different language, then award a voice over artist the work, managing their delivery of their voice over in their language for the four separate videos, working with the editing team to lay in the foreign VO and time it with the images and finally finding a native speaker in each language to do a quality check of our final videos (since no one on our team was bilingual). It was a long and arduous process – in the end Toro was thrilled to have quality videos to deliver to their partners around the world.
This project was a test for many on our team – but with such a great crew one we passed with flying colors. We were lucky to partner with some great people with the Toro company who helped fill holes, remove roadblocks and pave the way for us to be successful on this endeavor.
