Deadline Week

Last week was deadline week; We had a main 16x9 ad finished, and needed to produce several versions for social media: A 9x16, a 1x1 and a 4x5.

Here are three valuable lessons that I learned from the project:

01 Do as much as you can in advance to prepare

We knew there would be a tight turnaround time between approval of the main ad, and the final deadline for all delieverables. So we completed as much as we could ahead of finishing the main ad, such as formatting the intro/outros for alternate aspect ratios.

This approach saved us time when it came to assembling the final deliverables, once the other unknowns became clear.

02 Ensure you have access to 4K, graphics- and text-free versions of your ad

While the final deliverable was in HD, we had 4K graded footage, which allowed us to repurpose the footage to fit a 9x16 frame without any blurring or pixelation.

Removing graphics and text from the footage provided us with the most flexibility when adjusting the layout for other aspect ratios.

03 Effective collaboration and teamwork are key to a successful result

The highly collaborative nature of the structure at Wordley meant this was much easier than it might otherwise have been. Also, my colleagues are all awesome and really easy to work with, reducing the stress of a tight deadline by about 99% <3