Recruitment and Culture Videos

We were commissioned by our friends at Wooshii to produce a series of recruitment and culture videos for Amazon to sit on their Inside Amazon YouTube and LinkedIn channels.

The goal of the content was to promote two new job vacancies at their Munich, Germany HQ and to attract suitable candidates. The brief was to encapsulate the everyday life of an Amazon Vendor Manager and Marketplace Consultant, showcasing the flexible, entrepreneurial nature of the role and effectively conveying the work culture at the branch.

Working with a global giant such as Amazon brings with it certain challenges and expectations. It was essential that we were able to produce elevated content with a high production value that was consistent with Amazon’s tone of voice and previous video content.

Six of Ether/Awe’s team flew out to Munich to capture the content. The crew was broken up into an A and B team, allowing us to shoot interviews and b-roll simultaneously and ensuring that sufficient time was allocated to each setup. A total of five videos were shot over two days, consisting of four interview-driven ‘day-in-the-life” and role explainer videos, and one deep dive piece – which was to have supplementary animation added to it later.

For the ‘day-in-the-life’ and role explainer pieces the main challenge was to implement a consistent tone and style across each of the videos. Movement was utilised throughout to ensure that the content remained fluid and engaging, supplemented by an energetic and uplifting score.

We implemented a hazy film-like grade with strong orange hues to add a cinematic edge to the videos and to allude to Amazon’s orange brand colour.

The most challenging edit was the deep dive piece, which required us to build supplementary animated assets with a hand-drawn effect to integrate into the video. These animations needed to have their own unique style yet remain in-sync with Amazon’s brand guidelines. They also needed to reinforce what the speaker was saying without being either too literal or too abstract.

We spent several weeks extensively storyboarding the piece with one of our animators, going back and forth with Amazon and Wooshii before eventually commencing the animation itself. Extensive keyframing was undertaken, with the majority of the lines moving slightly frame by frame so as to appear to be hand drawn – allowing us to create a fun and engaging style that reinforced Amazon’s amiable tone of voice. These animations were then integrated into the main video, utilizing rotoscoping to place animations behind the subject to make it feel like the art was in the space with the speaker.

This was an incredibly successful project for everyone involved.

The final videos were able to achieve the desired structure, thematics and aesthetic outlined in the brief and helped to establish an elevated production value template for Amazon’s ‘Inside Amazon’ content going forward.

The content was well received by the client and led to us working on several other Amazon campaigns, including Alexa Stories, Amazon DSP and the AWS Summit.

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