After producing a corporate video and a series of testimonial videos for The LBA Group’s website in 2012 and 2014, Natalie Halpern Productions was very excited when we were asked to produce 16 corporate anniversary videos to celebrate the Jacksonville accounting and wealth management firm’s 50th Anniversary.
Having gotten to know the partners and the firm’s core values of putting the client at the center and giving back to the community to improve Jacksonville’s quality of life, we looked forward to looking back and learning more about The LBA Group’s early beginnings.
But how do you capture five decades of a firm’s history in five minutes?
Research, research, research.
The approach to producing this video would be similar to many of the other videos and films Natalie Halpern Productions has created: seek to understand why and how the firm was established and draw out the most memorable moments in The LBA Group’s history. This was accomplished through a honed interview process that Executive Producer and former broadcast journalist Natalie Halpern has made the foundation of her videos and films.
The first step was conducting pre-interviews. These less formal interviews can be described as a kind of fact-finding conversation where you collect key pieces of information that will shape the questions for your on-camera interview.
After pre-interviewing Founding Partner Al LaFaye and Chairman of the Board Richard Brock, the B in LBA, we had a good sense of some of the company’s milestones and the key points in its evolution and development that Al, Richard and the other partners Natalie would interview could share anecdotes about.
Informed by that historical background, we spent two days filming 15 interviews that would become the narrative for the 50th Anniversary video.
It was interesting to hear about the way technology had influenced the field of accounting and allowed The LBA Group to branch out into other more specialized services to clients like retirement planning and wealth management. And we learned that it was The LBA Group’s Richard Brock who brought Dr. Borland and Dr. Groover to the table to form the large medical practice we know today as the Borland-Groover Clinic.
With nearly 10 hours of interviews and another three hours of b-roll footage of some office and community service events, we started the difficult task of turning all of the raw content into a compelling video that would celebrate The LBA Group’s accomplishments and provide staff, clients and other community partners with a glimpse at how the 50 year old firm became the company it is today. Here’s the result of the research, lengthy interviews and the “alchemy” of video editing.
