Creating Content While Creating Content
- Academic Image
- Jul 20
- 2 min read
If a photo shoot only produces one thing, we've probably left something on the table.
Admissions needs content. Advancement needs content. Your website needs content. Social media never stops asking for more.
You have a lot of mouths to feed.
Every photo shoot, every video project, every day on campus is an investment. My job isn't just to create the assignment you hired me for—it's to help you get the greatest possible return on that investment.
When I get an assignment, I'm already looking for the second assignment hiding inside the first one.
Last fall, for the 14th year, I photographed the all-school photo at Blair Academy. It's 500 students, faculty and staff standing on a hillside.
That's the assignment.
On this shoot I set up a second camera to capture the arrival and departure of participants and that resulted in a fun stop motion video for social media. Very little additional effort on my part. No additional effort for those being photographed.
The Tatnall School in Wilmington hired Academic Image to film and produce a Big Shiny Video. They took this practice to the next level: They didn't hire us to produce a video. They hired us to produce a year's worth of content. The video was just the beginning.
In the course of filming the Big Shiny Video we interviewed students, the leadership team and captured b-roll footage across all divisions of the school. We delivered the final video and gave them all of our footage from the shoot.
Over the past year I've watched those clips show up on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. I have no idea what software they used to edit them—and it doesn't matter. They started with professional footage, so every post looked polished.
Instead of one finished video, they suddenly had hundreds of short moments they could mix, match, and reuse whenever they needed content.
If a photo shoot only produces one thing, we left something on the table.