Unboxing Alanis Obomsawin’s DVD box set

Company: National Film Board of Canada
Role: Concept, strategy and production (the videographer, director and editor was KyVy LeDuc)
Challenge: Why did I insist on an unboxing video featuring Alanis herself? Because the data I’ve gathered in the last year or so at the NFB demonstrates that Alanis content will reliably find itself among our social media’s top 5 in any given month. Unboxing videos also happen to be a popular format that we see on social media, especially among Indigenous influencers, who are tapped into the latest social media trends.
Result: This video was published in February 2024 on the NFB’s Facebook, X and Instagram platforms, and was in our top 5 on each platform that month.

A Strong Start

Company: National Film Board of Canada
Role: Concept and strategy
Challenge: When I started analyzing the performance data for the NFB’s social media platforms, I noticed that our average view times were a little low, and I wanted us to do better. So I had the idea of including catchy, sometimes even shocking text at the beginning of some of our excerpts. This text tells viewers what to expect from the video and allows them to decide early on whether or not they want to stick around to view the rest.
Result: Since I started implementing these texts, and A-B testing them as thumbnails, our average view times have increased and videos with texts at the beginning consistently find themselves in our monthly top 5s.

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Quote-Videos

Company: National Film Board of Canada
Role: Concept and strategy
Challenge: Quote-videos are another format that’s quite popular on the NFB’s social media account. Each time I publish one, it inevitably ends up in our top 5 that month, with a high number of views and excellent engagement numbers. I experimented with this format because it’s popular on platforms like TikTok, and tends to work well when the person whose quote we’re seeing play out on the screen happens to say something poignant.
Result: Our quote-videos reliably end up in our top 5s, especially on X.

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Memeification

Company: National Film Board of Canada
Role: Concept, strategy and design
Challenge: It’s not often that we lean into humour at the NFB, so I felt it was high time to disrupt that streak. And we had the perfect film for it: Modern Goose. It has everything we need to create funny memes, namely, an animal so hardcore, its alternative name is the Cobra Chicken. Sure, I relied on poop jokes, but isn’t that appropriate for the Canada Goose?
Result: The first of these posts (We’re Canada Geese…) has garnered more shares than usual, and overall engagements are higher than other posts from March 2024.