Developing Video Scenarios

 In February 2020, ten bachelor students in TV production at Media City Bergen worked intensively on a new project. They were challenged to develop and visualize three video scenarios for the fifth and last ViSmedia conference.

By Thomas Wold.

The students were told to use their imagination and don ́t think about realities or probabilities. They were asked to create scenarios from their own perspective, with special attention to visual technology. Teacher Hedvig Idås gave each group just a few keywords to start out with: news surveillance from above; alternative truths; and experimental learning in immersive environments.

-The scenario videos served the purpose of being short infomercial films for the three conference sessions , Idås explains.

From there they started creating ideas. One of the groups came up with a story on an issue that all of sudden struck globally and put the whole world on hold. Two weeks later, on March 12 2020, the world was more or less in lockdown. The conference was postponed, and the videos were kept in the folder, waiting for better times.

- This was the actually the first time we had to adapt for a client, says student Christina Prestegård. It was also a new experience to work creatively with a specific target assignment. The creative freedom was both challenging and exciting, the student Ronja Schrøder adds. - We were free to indulge ourselves creatively, and we had to find the right solutions under pressure, Christina is certain that the strict frames and deadlines helped the creative workflow.- We had a lot of creative freedom, and we got constructive feedback that was really good. For every new deadline we got some particular pressure which was followed up by Idås. That helped the workflow a lot.