Illinois Association of School Boards

Project: Video to train new School Board Members on principles of effective governance. The video is a series of scenarios used in conjunction with classroom training.

Goals: Create a realistic video that engages the viewer and provokes discussion. The video in conjunction with the classroom training would be of a high enough quality that it could be resold as a national training tool.

Unique Challenges: It was very important to avoid unrealistic dialogue, for performances that sounded as natural as possible.

Process: During preproduction we strategized on methods of achieving the most realistic performance out of the actors. The potential school board members who would view this had a low tolerance for poor quality acting or unrealistic dialogue. If they didn't think it looked like them, they would simply tune out the message. To begin the process, IASB had taped some home movies of typical school board issues and language. This created a great baseline for the scriptwriter to work from. However, how would it really sound coming out of actors mouths? And would they really get the stress and the emotional heat of the boardroom? To really get the actors into the characters and to fine tune the script, after careful casting, the actors were brought in for a daylong taped rehearsal workshop with a team of the client's trainers and content experts. By the end of the day, the results were already making themselves apparent. The actors had truly taken on the lives of these fictional school boards. They displayed the quirks and emotions of actual school boards. In addition, script dialogue was fined tuned to nail down the true voice of the characters while maintaining the effectiveness of the training messages.

Results: Since the project completion the client has brought samples of the training to a few regional and national trade conventions to market the new training and fine-tune the print and classroom portions. At each of these events, the video was reviewed with resounding success. The most common comments from written and oral reviews were how polished the video seemed as well as how realistic the video appeared. Participants felt they could truly identify with the characters.