Behind the Stream: Incredible Work in Schools

Most of us know at least one kid who has felt out of place and struggled to find their way in school. Your organization has a program that can help them thrive. That work could help even more kids if more people knew about it! That’s a story worth telling and a video worth making. That’s why we work with so many different education organizations and schools.
Choosing the right video company can be tricky. There’s a lot to think about. Check out this week’s video to see the amazing work these programs do and what goes into making their videos.

(Beth:) If you ever wanna restore your faith in humanity, go talk to some kids. Go watch some of our videos where we talk to kids.

(Beth:) If you work in education of any kind, video storytelling can be a big part of how you send your messages online about what you do and luckily enough, Mainstream has gotten an opportunity; We’ve niched in schools a little bit.

(Steph:) We’ve worked with, um, the Colorado League of Charter schools for years. Not only supporting their conference, doing other social media type videos for them, but going into 13 different schools to, to follow them for a full year over a grant that they had. Um, that was amazing. We’ve worked with, um, the Colorado Education Initiative, been in eight or nine schools for them. Um, we’ve done individual schools like Challenge to Excellence. We’ve worked with the National Charter Alliance going into some schools,

(Beth:) Career and technical education with Jeffco.

(Steph:) That’s right. (Beth:) A specific niche.

(Beth & Steph:) Warren Tech.

(Beth:) A specific niche program within a more traditional public school system.

(Steph:) That’s right.

(Beth:) Yes.

(Steph:) And in every case I have loved it.

(Beth:) Yes.

(Steph:) I love going into schools. I love interviewing teachers, administrators, parents, kids– kids especially, are super fun to interview. We know how to go into schools. We know how to be respectful of class time and schedules (Steph:) and trying not to be disruptive ’cause I guarantee you, when you bring a camera into an elementary school, you’re gonna get about 50 kids running up to the camera to say hello.

(Beth:) Yes, yes.

(Steph:) Um, but we were also very careful. You know, we talked through permissions beforehand.

(Beth:) Mm-Hmm.

(Steph:) We talked through whose faces can we show? We need to get releases for the, for kiddos that we get on camera. Um, but we also know how to, Erica, I will say, knows how to film without showing faces in a way that doesn’t, it’s not apparent that we’re trying to avoid faces, I guess is a good way to put it.

(Erica:) Yeah. And there’s just a lot of movement when you’re in schools. There’s people moving everywhere–

(Beth & Erica:) and at all times.

(Erica:) So being able to go in and be as least disruptive as you can into these classes, especially with the little kids and get, you know, some of those like closeups of hands doing something, typing calculators Mm-Hmm. Over the shoulder shots of, you know, drawing, um, to kind of show that we’re in a school, but still being respectful of what actually are we showing here? Um, it’s really fun. I really, I love it. Um, it’s always very visual. Mm-Hmm. Which is awesome. The energy is just, it’s so good. And even with the administrators, parents, teachers, they love showing off their school. Yeah. You know, they’re just really passionate about it. And I think it’s really fun to bring those passion stories to life.

(Beth:) Yes. Inherently in education is this idea of transforming kids and of making lives better and educating people. We know the landmines, the variables. How to, how to make sure and contain costs. Talking about that on the front end, letting our clients know what is gonna cost, what, how many days we need. How, you know, if we need to get a superintendent or we need to bring somebody in that is a big part of the, um, story, but really only has a half an hour window, we’re gonna work around that to make it possible.

(Steph:) It’s a respect thing.

(Beth:) It’s a respect thing. We’re very, we, we’ve done this enough to know. And that’s why I think we keep getting hired because it’s a small community. The education people tell the other education people about us, and that is a win, win, win across the board. So we would love to film your school. Let us know if we can help.