The Executive team at Orange Christian School, a school we’d partnered with for years, came to us with a request: they wanted a virtual tour.
I’m cautious about virtual tours. They tend to get shot a little like Google Street View, and Street View flattens everything: you can have a beautiful park, and on Street View it looks flat, washed out, tired. A school virtual tour can do the same thing to a campus, taking the life out of the very thing it’s meant to show.
So instead, we proposed something: take the concept of a tour, design it well, then film a video around it.
We sat with the OCS executive team for a couple of hours and ran a tour design process around our tour design canvas, which draws on the Experience Builder framework, enrolment journey thinking, and some messaging and story strategy to craft the narrative of a tour.
We had a few constraints to deal with: short on time, short on budget, and short on people who wanted to be on camera or had time to rehearse. So we made a creative call. Different voices would read parts of the script, and the visuals would shift to match whoever was speaking, even when we weren’t filming them talking. The storyboard followed the voices.
When you have a particular output in mind, it can be hard to see the alternatives sitting around it. Our design-thinking approach means that even for something simple like a video, even on a tight timeline, we stop, take a breath, and step back to the start. We walk your team through a process that gets their job done, tick the virtual tour, while pulling it as close to best practice as the constraints allow, and setting it up so the work keeps paying off. That’s the win I’m always looking for: a win for the people who asked, a win for the families who’ll watch it, and a win for the school’s bigger story.
The requested tour video, delivered: a guided walk through the school, focused on what makes it distinctive.
A website header video and a bank of B-roll from the same shoot.
A tour narrative designed collaboratively the executive team, reusable well beyond the video.
MCCC’s prospectus was storyboarded in the workshop as a low-fidelity prototype, mapped to the messaging strategy and the new website’s language, and built on the photography and graphic elements of the wider brand world.
Belmont’s orientation booklets for new Prep and Kindy families, designed to do two jobs at once, the practical and the emotional, so families felt prepared and cared for, not just handed a checklist.
