Recording Top Student Tips with Handshake

In July 2023 we shot and edited videos with student careers company, Handshake, at London Broadcast on Harrowby Street. Everything shot in 4k on Sony cameras with a dolly and three point lighting – everyone was excited to be back in the studio! Keeping our signature casual tone and impeccable shoot layout, this time, instead of a green screen we were working with the sofa set up.

Breakdown of the day

The interview shoot consisted of 5 recent graduates, being asked questions by Handshake representatives Bethany Spencer and Omari Edwards, under the direction of C60’s Peter Shevlin. Talking about their time at university, how they found that illusive first job role and their following experience in their graduate job, this felt like something that had to be said and was completely rivetting. The interviews concentrated on the advice they would give to current students when coming to their end of their degree and gearing up for job applications.

These interviews were edited and arranged into 2 forms of content:

1) A set of long-form videos to go on the Handshake youtube page for anyone to watch the full interview.

2) A series of short-form videos ranging from 5 to 60 seconds to upload to the Handshake app for it’s upcoming overhaul and push for more relatable and useful content.

The shoot itself

With the shot list in place and London Broadcast handling all the technical side, I was left to take notes during each interview in case any key moments stood out to me when I got to editing the whole thing. I was also listening out for hiccups or loud noises to edit out too. I wasn’t expecting to relate to the content as much as I did! Having graduated 2 years ago, I was ready to think that this was not for me, however, halfway through the 2nd interview I finally noticed how invested I’d become in the whole day!

Whilst useful to a student, the advice was applicable to anyone in life in any walk of life, especially when it came to career guidance. From the importance of hobbies, to creating a master CV; while I was taking notes to help my editing process faster, I was also taking notes on how I could change and fix up my own CV, or areas where I could ask for feedback from someone in my field and better improved myself.

In short, any students or recent graduates using the Handshake app can look forward to content curated towards any situation, and learn useful tips that will certainly better their university experience, and make that leap to the working world a lot easier and educational.

Editing the whole thing

The editing turned out to be quite the larger job than I was expecting. Although it would seem like the harder task, editing the interviews into long-form videos was the easiest part for me, as it was generally a lot of trimming repeated questions, stuttering, and any bits that may feature brand names or locations, which can take a 50 minute video down to 30-35 minutes. The part I found the hardest was editing the short-form videos and creating the thumbnails.

It sounds easy to snip, clip, and upload but I kept finding a lot of the clips needed that bit of extra finessing to make them appealing to Gen-Z. Striking the balance between interviewer and interviewee within a 60 second timeframe was certainly a challenge! With a lot of variations and feedback, I’m very happy with the final result and hope some of you will be able to check them out over on the app. Although, one downside is all the amount of videos and artwork leftover at the end:

As for thumbnails, the main issue with them is time management and brand guidelines. I was finding it hard to edit the videos, then also put together a thumbnails with different colour schemes and assets that felt different between each guest, but also followed set guidelines in place, to the point I had started work on the thumbnails before the day of the shoot just to start getting feedback. After some back and forth, it was suggested to follow the style of a recent Handshake social media post, as seen below:

And with that I was able to develop the thumbnails a lot faster and easily, making them seem a lot more colourful and dynamic with just a few changes as you can see from the comparison:

At the end of the day…

This whole project has been quite the learning experience, being tasked with a lot of work and responsibility did worry me at first, especially when some of the problems ballooned out and seemed to keep cropping up, however I did come out feeling a lot more confident and prouder in my skills as an editor and artist.

I learned some key tips into improving myself and professional appearance, tackled a large scale editing job on my own, and know now what to do to update my CV in a way that’s more valuable to employers.

It’s always a pleasure to work with Handshake, and couldn’t of asked for a better studio setup thanks to London Broadcast, here’s to another collaboration soon!