Seal the Seasons: Meet the Farmers

Meet the Farmers was a video series created with the intention of existence long before my time working with Seal the Seasons. The problem, however, was that the person responsible for putting together the original run of Meet the Farmers interviews left Seal the Seasons mid-way through the production of the original videos. Upon my arrival, I was presented with a backlog of several interviews that were shot by the original videographer, but never made it to full production and had been sitting in the can for the better part of a year and a half.

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I won’t mince words: much of Seal the Seasons’ original meet the farmers footage suffered from many production-related hang-ups that are generally the result of less-skilled videographers. Lots of footage was not gain staged very well and would regularly clip, much of it had an unusable amount of camera shake, and a lot of footage had inconsistent or downright terrible color science. Much of my job for meet the farmers was twofold. The first part was handling the original Meet the Farmers footage to take a bunch of essentially disparate interview data and make something cohesive out of it.

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To some, this might seem like a futile effort when trashing it altogether would suffice. But part of my role at Seal the Seasons was getting the company ramped into content marketing and ideating properties that were feasible enough to execute in a procedural light. Naturally, for a frozen produce company, Meet the Farmers was not the only idea we had for Seal the Seasons video projects. We also had ideas for farmers’ market interview content, travel guides, as well as recipe videos. Out of the options we had available, Meet the Farmers had a few great things going for it. The first was that we already had footage, so we would already have some kind of product that we could work with on promotional channels. The second was that we had easy access to the farmers, so we could procedurally gather the interviews as needed. The third was that gathering footage on farms requires a fairly agile set up—so none of the Meet the Farmers videos would require a ton of equipment. Just some cameras, a couple of microphones, and a little bit of stabilizing equipment.

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Inversely, most of the options outside of Meet the Farmers were either production intensive and would call for large amounts of space, or equipment, or they required us to travel far and wide in order to get our content. By comparison, Meet the Farmers called for some travel, but all of the travel was within North Carolina.

 

This brings me to the second part of my role with Meet the Farmers: to revisit the video project as part of greater investment in Seal the Seasons’ video production capabilities. This would call for not just new cameras and equipment to modernize these efforts, but also a whole new process by which to govern Seal the Seasons video production so that video content can be produced in a competent and predictable way.

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To the credit of the original videographers, something that I quickly learned about filming on farms is that it is uniquely difficult work—and shaped by a smorgasbord of spatial and environmental factors. For instance, something that people—including myself—tend to not think about when looking at shaky camera footage, is that farms are difficult to film on because all of the ground is uneven. It is driven over by trucks, tractors, and crews of men and women going to work. It gets rained on, and sedimented, and all of these things together make for very difficult terrain to film smooth footage on—even with a gimbal on hand. The other thing was that for some reason or another, most of our trips to farm locations involved relatively extreme environmental conditions. During the spring, we were exposed to torrential amounts of water that loosened the ground with mud, while in the summer, exposed to extreme amounts of humidity and heat—which rapidly builds fatigue when carrying camera equipment.

 

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All of these things together meant that even with some of the lightest equipment on the market, a lot of our shoot’s production quality would be challenged by arbitrary environmental factors—thereby rendering the quality of Meet the Farmers down to a crapshoot, or in other words: the polar opposite of predictability. Though works, such as our video with Ethan Lineberger, truly represent the height of what was intended with Meet the Farmers as a project, the unpredictability of executing the project has much to do with why it was shuttered in the end. Other reasons had to do with difficulties scheduling farmers around harvest season, as well as creative differences due to changes in leadership mid-way through the project.

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In the end, however, Meet the Farmers was a great opportunity for Seal the Seasons to try new ideas, as well as see what works for them, and what does not. Something that is lost on a lot of marketers when trying to develop new content ideas is that creating content does have some degree of risk attached to it. While yes, the risk of non-viewership is always persistent, content can also be shuttered for reasons outside of viewership. Meet the Farmers, like all content, was avowedly a creative risk for Seal the Seasons, and one that did not pan out. But what the brand did gain was data on how to better reach their customer through content that speaks to them.

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Now with Meet the Farmers in the rear-view mirror, I along with the leadership at Seal the Seasons have developed newer ideas that not only lean into what the company’s target demographic is, but also are more enjoyable pieces of work to create, and watch. In the end, I think finding what works is what one should hope for when taking risks with content creation.

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