Behind the Scenes of a Corporate Video Project for Hewlett Packard

We don’t normally blog about our latest corporate video project. We certainly never post anything about a program that has not yet been released by our client. And then things get forgotten. That’s why I’m revisiting this video shoot on its 3-year anniversary.

The Project

On November 1, 2015, the Hewlett Packard Company split into two. There was a big celebration and a prominent moment was when the president of HP Inc., Dion Weisler, appeared on a 4-sided video screen suspended high in the banquet tent. He was speaking from the famous Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard garage where the company started.

I directed Dion Weisler in this corporate video project and then I edited the video. In fact, I directed him in countless other, lower-profile video shoots over a five-year period. He’s a fun, easy-going guy, but like any powerful CEO, he’s always short on time and needs to be handled respectfully. That was one of the areas where HP project managers had full confidence in my abilities and I never let them down.

The Challenge

In a corporate video project the CEO deserves full respect, but also needs direction and honest feedback. So does the General Counsel (John Schultz), the Chief Marketing Officer (Antonio Neri), all of the VPs, and so on, down the corporate ladder to the lowest-level junior engineer and legal department intern. When I work for a client on a video shoot, their mission is my mission; all of their people and I pull in the same direction. That means having to respect each other without being afraid to do what needs to be done.

Not everyone gets the nuances right. Dion Weisler speaks with an Australian accent, so he pronounces HP as Hey-ch-pee. During one corporate video project that I didn’t direct, a very self-confident but inexperienced director stopped him twice during the taping to instruct him how to pronounce the name of the company. On the third take Dion made it clear that THIS IS THE TAKE THEY WILL GO WITH. The director didn’t last the rest of the week at HP.

The final Day One video is here. Don’t miss the end of this compilation where you see a snippet of how we shot this corporate video project and then you’ll see the final projection.