College of Coastal Georgia Environmental Sciences

Case Study

Video by Sam Ghioto

Executive Produced by College of Coastal Georgia Environmental Sciences Program

Last August I met with the Environmental Sciences program professors Dr. Tagaki, Dr. Maclahan, and Dr. Deemy because they were interested in an explainer video for their burgeoning program. Only a few years ago, they had five students. Now, with over 100 students, they have become a pillar at the College of Coastal Georgia and epitomize the college’s mantra, College is Better by the Beach.

So, in the early conversations with them, I quickly understood they wanted a video that summarizes the program concisely in 2-3 minutes. That’s less work for them to do over the long run. This video would be the first impression for prospective students.

We identified key areas to cover information-wise:

  • Field work is a huge component of the class work. If College is Better by the Beach, it’s because you can literally study the beach (among other coastal low country ecosystems).

  • The program is so fun. Often the field work is out in nature, and there are many opportunities to go to Sapelo Island and other parts of Georgia and even Florida to do fun things like caving, hiking, scuba diving, engaging field work, and more.

  • You will get graduate level and career ready experience. The program will give you the tools for success: over 90% of alumni are employed in ENVS careers. That’s a staggering fact.

To encapsulate the above, we created a list of materials we needed:

  • Alumi and student testimonials

  • Professor interviews

  • Field work footage

  • Archival field trip footage

I worked closely with Dr. Takagi, Dr. Mac, and Dr. Deemy, and over the course of a few weeks, collected all the interviews, shot some fieldwork footage, collected field trip footage, and I also drew from my extensive library of coastal landscape b-roll footage.

The Edit

When dealing with a sophisticated message, I will watch the interviews and generate the transcripts that I put into a Microsoft Word document. I sit on the document over the course of a few days and get rid of a lot of words. This is my writing process in creating videos: I read over the transcript and make the most compelling message possible out of the interviews.

Once the script is created, I go through Premiere Pro, my editing software, and cut the a-roll (interview) footage together. When the message is there, that’s when I add in b-roll and find the right music that complements the message.

The Result

After creating the video, where were we going to put it? Obviously, the website and social media are important areas to put such a video. The online presence of the video has hyped up the program greatly, but there was an in-person opportunity to play the video. The goal from the beginning of creating this video was to play it at the ENVS Program Shrimp Boil in February 2024, a fundraising dinner on the Coastal Georgia Rooftop with many partners from the local community. This combination of online and in-person has had clear results.

“The video has helped us a lot - so far our fall 2023 percentage of applied students that are enrolling is up over 30% where it had been 25% last year (this is a strong improvement because we also have more applicants than last year),” Dr. Deemy says.