Everyone (even business owners) keep asking me the same question these days: How to create an inspirational video amidst the coronavirus pandemic. The topic of course being the pandemic. While it is hard to concoct an inspirational message and put it in to the video, I thought of doing the exact same thing (instead of writing about it). Sri Lanka has been hit hard economically with an ongoing 60 day lockdown. The most unfortunate of all are the day laborers and daily wage earners, who are struggling to make ends meet. They are clustered in small spaces, without amenities, simple pleasures. So what I thought of doing was to center the video on these forgotten section of our population and titled the video “what about us”. Below is the process (and the video) I used to create this video.
Before writing up the script, I thought about what to include in it, being mindful that I was going to show footage of low income people. I had a collection of footage I took on my daily excursions around the city of Colombo. Then I wanted to tie this to nature, as this pandemic is restricted to humans. That is how I came up with the line “nature will thrive”. And then I up with rains will fall and flowers will bloom.
Then came the transition “But what about us”… and then I kept building on the difficulties we faced (applicable to everyone in the Sri Lankan society). Being restricted to our houses, being away from family and friends, devoid of fun, work and entertainment (while the later does not hold true to anyone with a good internet connection).
Finally the punch line – The message was to all Sri Lankans and then I came up with Be strong, stay strong and stay Sri Lanka strong! I worked on it a lot as the ending was to capture the entire video and the inspiration behind the message.
As for the footage I have used, I borrowed a lot of drone footage of the first part of the video. Many of the faces you see, are personally shot by myself on my smart phone. I suppressed the color of the video to show sadness, and the darker days we faced. And it all came together to which I think this video was somewhat a successful inspirational and emotional video. Yes I did use my logo at the end (ever so discretely) and made the sri lanka flag as vibrant as it could be compared to the rest of the video.
Please put a like or a comment to the video and help it be found on youtube. And if you were truly inspired please subscribe to my channel. Hope this pandemic will end soon and we come out of the Sri Lanka Strong!
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