At Red Bee Media, we provide a wide range of broadcast services to many of the world’s leading media organizations. But it is not wider known that we also provide post-production services from the Broadcast Centre, our main facility in West London at the heart of the UK’s broadcast community. The White City campus, adjacent to the newly re-opened Television Centre, provides a historic location with a modern and vibrant feel that comes from the revamp of the whole area, from Westfield up to the old White City building.

Post Production can be broadly divided into long and short form editing. Short-form promos for TV are quite a unique audiovisual production genre. Known as entertainment marketing, its purpose is to promote and give visibility to the TV channel content. The length of a short-form promo could vary from 10 seconds to 2 minutes with an exceptional need for creativity and quality. Crafting these promos require a quite specific set of skills.

We at Red Bee Media are short form specialists and our Editing team work across a wide variety of content. In an average month, our creations involve everything from public facing advertising campaigns, to cross-platform short form videos trailing major national events. The work covers both global high impact projects with partners across three continents, as well as local productions including dark Scandinavian dramas.

Working from an unscripted brief

Have you ever thought about how many people could be involved in the creation of a promotional clip with just a couple of minutes from a TV drama? First, the creative team need to work on a brief based on the objectives of a campaign, creating a creative concept. After that, the editing and technical team need to turn this idea into reality. We work closely together with our clients to design and generate a creative response to the given brief. Sometimes a full script is developed, sometimes only a handful of guidelines. The magic happens once our Editors, Audio Engineers and VFX designers get to work. The combination of experience, imagination, technical skills and creativity forms an alchemy of sorts, with an intriguing short-promo as a result.

Working on a national event…

Our promos need to target the right audience. But how do you do this when the audience is the whole country? Recently, we created a campaign covering the Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle from interviews with couples across the whole of the United Kingdom about love, commitment and weddings. We worked closely with the client to build a charming and effective series of videos distributed on linear TV and social media platforms, covering the views of love and relationships across the nation. Not a minor challenge!

… and then going global

We also deliver global campaigns where we often include our international partners in the production. Different time zones can be an issue, but with flexibility and collaborative efforts, you come a long way. From a creative perspective, our global promos tend to focus on visual-only content to make it resonate with all audiences with using dialogue and/or subtitles. Images can speak a thousand words, a logic that also applies to global video promos.

How Audio drives a campaign

The audio in a promo is as important as the video. For graphics-based campaigns there is no dialogue-based script or natural sound, which means that an audio track needs to be designed from scratch. In these cases, we develop a brief with our clients, and the Audio Engineer will work on generating the feel, the pace and the story you want to portray with the sound. On a recent cross platform video campaign for a South American Broadcaster, our Audio Engineer created an audio track from scratch that was applied to 20 different products being advertised.

To sum up, at Red Bee Media we work very close to our clients to find the most creative and effective solutions for their promotional videos, from Royal Weddings to Scandinavian drama and South American Broadcasts productions. No challenge is too big for the minds and editing suites of the Red Bee Media post production team. Want to try? Get in touch and challenge our editing team to create the most amazing TV promos

Thomas Ioannou, Creative Director