Meet VSTOne: The Hospital Room of the Future
Marketing Video for VirtuSense Technologies
- Project Goal: Create a flagship product video to introduce VSTOne in its new form to the Acute Healthcare market
- Role(s): Cowriter, Director, Camera Operator, Editor, Motion Graphics Designer, VFX Artist, Composer
- Date Released: June 27th, 2023
This marketing video project was the joint brainchild and work of myself, as Multimedia Lead at VirtuSense Technologies, and Rose Watson, our Marketing Lead. Though we were certainly the main driving forces, it couldn’t have been accomplished without the generous assistance of many other people (at least 23 that we were able count).
This is how we made it.
Part 1: Writing and Project pitch
The Brief
The brief we got was fairly simple: It’d been two years since our last big marketing piece, Now You Have 30 Seconds. This was an evergreen piece that had done and continued to do well for us in bringing in new leads. This video was mostly applicable to VSTAlert, which had become focused on mainly the post-acute market. We lacked a solid concept piece for what we wanted to become our flagship product: VSTOne, the all-in-one technology solution for hospitals.
There were a few things we wanted to recapture from the success of the 30 Seconds video. First, it was digestible. There isn’t a lot of technical concepts or feature listing in the video, but it still got the core functionality of the poroduct across in clear and memorable way. This was going to be especially narrow a line to ride for VSTOne, which contained the core functionality of VSTAlert plus a multitude of additional features and more on the product roadmap.
The second thing we wanted to recapture was the quirky, memorable, and sharable style; this combined with a through-line message had made 30 seconds our highest performing video when it came to landing high value leads as well as spreading brand awareness.
The other fun thing about the brief: We had a preliminary budget. And not a modest one either, at least in the context of the-run-and-gun no budget/low budget marketing content we had been doing up to this point. The initial budget outline was $10-15k, which compared to the ~$4k we had spent on the 30 Seconds production was a giant step upwards in potential production value.
Rose and I saw the huge opportunity we had- so we got right to work on the script.
The script
Of course, before doing the script, we had to nail down the messaging. As the marketing lead on this project, this was up to Rose: She put together a full list of all the main points that had to be covered in the video, as well as features that could appear as tools used by the characters.
From there, she organized those messaging notes into a kind of outline. She sent it my way, and I wrote up a first draft of the script based on an idea I had that fit with it. We got on a call, discussed and polished the draft, tightening up dialogue, moving scenes around to msake it flow, and riffing off of eachother for ideas for visuals to go with it.
We had a very polished script we were quite proud. So we sent it off to Jared De Roo, our Director of Marketing, to get it approved.
It was rejected.
As it should have been. The original idea I had come up with was a super hero theme- Rose and I are both nerds, so we had a lot to draw on for that. And it lined up a whole message of “Healthcare workers are the heroes, our technology is like a robotic sidekick” with a heavy lean on JARVIS from Iron Man as Inspiration.
Jared was able to see what we couldn’t in our excitement about the idea: Firstly, the “Healthcare workers are Heroes” angle had ben done to death: It was on the nose and wouldn’t have stood out in a sea of similar messaging. Second, the messaging didn’t match our brand and core ideas of the product as well as it could; and thirdly, all the superhero visuals we had planned would have been a nightmare to get through legal – we were running the risk of infringing copyright or stripping away the gags and visuals that made everything work in the first place.
Jared knew we could do better, and he wanted this video to take its time at the beginning- better to make something truly great than to rush out a half-baked idea.
So it was back to the drawing board.
We busied ourselves with other projects while we stwed on the feedback and thought of ways to bring the video to life. Until one day Rose called me up with flash of inspriation:
“One word: Sci-fi.”
This was it. This was the inspiration we needed.
We were able to keep much of the messaging and outline from the original script, and even a couple of lines, but completely changed the theme from heroes to science fiction.
This allowed us to keep the “hologram sidekick” for our AI, but adapt from a JARVIS type of character to more of a Cortana. Sci-fi is a much older genre, so there are a lot more tropes visuals we could pull for gags without getting in danger of infringing on Intellectual Property.
And more importantly than all that: It fit our brand so much better. VirtuSense as a company is essentially creating a part of the future of healthcare, making sci-fi concepts into reality. This was a concept with staying power.
From there, we were able to make a new version of the script and get it approved to move forward into preproduction. It was time to get thing moving on the video side.
Parts 2 through 4 of breakdown coming soon!
Tobias Lansberry 