A 60-second sponsor video for Dawson at a green building event in a Bellingham bar. Instead of another logo reel, I made it a trivia question everyone in the room could play along with.
The Green Building Slam is a night of short talks about green building put on by Sustainable Connections. It’s at the Wild Buffalo, so it’s a room full of architects, builders and energy nerds who came to learn something and have a drink. This year it’s on October 16, and Dawson is one of the primary sponsors.
Each sponsor gets a video that plays between speakers. Ours needed to be 60 seconds or less, look good, feel local and work with or without sound. The deadline was October 9.
I’m kind of obsessed with Netflix’s daily trivia game. I play it every single day, and it got me thinking that a trivia question is a lot harder to ignore than a logo. When a question pops up on screen, you want to see if you know the answer.
I also watched recordings of past Slams and found out the host used to read sponsor trivia from the program between talks, so the idea already fit the night. I turned Dawson’s video into a question the whole bar could shout answers at, then followed it with the building facts.
Most sponsor videos at events like this follow the same formula. Drone shots, a logo, something about quality and commitment, and everyone keeps talking right over it. Nobody sitting at a bar owes a contractor a minute of their attention.
This crowd is also a tough sell for a big general contractor. They cheer for the small green builders and the policy wins, and they can smell a sales pitch. If we opened with square footage or schedule, we’d lose them in five seconds.
The question. Samish Commons is 171 affordable homes on Samish Way that Dawson built for the Bellingham Housing Authority. Out front is the old Aloha Motel’s neon palm tree, which was saved when the motel site became housing. Pretty much everyone in town has driven past it, so the question was simple: what does the sign say? Mahalo, Aloha, Paradise or Hula.
Once people get the answer, the green building facts come next. It’s all electric, the solar panels on the roof feed the grid, and the housing authority’s office is one of the first commercial buildings in Bellingham using cross-laminated timber.
The storyboard. I storyboarded the idea and took it to the leadership team for approval before spending any time shooting or editing.
The shot list. Once it was approved, I mapped out every drone move in a shot list. A top-down of cars on Samish Way, the sign on the corner, a slow pass over the solar panels and a wide orbit around the whole place to close it out.
The drone footage. I flew the site off the shot list and got everything I needed in one flight.
The edit. This is where I spent most of my time. The question types out and stays on screen long enough to read twice. The answers pop in one at a time right before the chorus, which hits right on B) ALOHA. From there the cuts follow the music, and the last hit of the song lands on the Dawson logo.
I also took out anything that made it look like an app, like glows, rounded corners and gradients, and put the question over a blurry night photo of Samish Way instead.
The song. I wanted some game show energy without picking something that would get annoying the second time a bar heard it. I went with the least annoying track I could find, a jazz funk song from Adobe Stock with a bit of a modern Jeopardy feel.
Approved and shipped. After 17 versions it got approved and went out on October 9. It plays at the Wild Buffalo on October 16.
Another company’s banner in the drone shots. A banner was hanging on a railing by the tower, and it showed up in three clips, including the closing orbit. I reframed the 4K footage so the banner never shows up, without having to paint anything out.
The first song had a singer. Lyrics under a trivia question fight with the words on screen, so I switched songs and re-cut the edit to fit the new one.
Getting the facts right. A room full of architects will catch a wrong fact. The old motel was condemned and torn down, so it had to say the motel site became homes, not the motel itself. A crew photo I thought was from 2022 turned out to be from 2020. Small stuff, but this crowd notices.
It has to read from the back of a bar. You can’t pause a video playing at an event, so people needed time to read everything on screen twice before it disappeared. I cut the question down to three short lines and kept the facts in plain sentences.
I storyboarded the idea first so leadership could sign off before I spent time shooting and editing.
I flew the site off the shot list: a top-down of Samish Way, the sign on the corner, a slow pass over the solar panels and a wide orbit to finish. The solar shot backs up the all-electric fact, so I put the text on the right since the panels are on the left.
The answers pop in one at a time right before the chorus, which hits right on B) ALOHA. The rest of the video follows the music, and the last hit of the song lands on the Dawson logo. Photography by Benjamin Benschneider and Dawson Construction.
Most sponsor videos are logo reels that people talk over. This one gives the room a question to answer. The facts are the same ones Dawson would put in any brochure, but people are way more into hearing them right after they’ve guessed the answer.
That’s how I like to work. Take something that would normally turn into branded corporate slop and make something people actually want to watch.
