Commercial making for Minamiuonuma City

A 3-days camp where high school and university students gather to make commercials for a city.

Minamiuonuma is a city located in Niigata Prefecture, Japan. It has become obvious that the population of people in their 20s to 40s is decreasing here.

As a Learning Designer at Taktopia & Co., I planned and facilitated a camp with Minamiuonuma City. This is a part of the city’s strategy to prevent outflow of young people, and increase the population moving into the city in the long run.

I set the activity to commercial making for the city because to do so, participants need to actively discover nice and beautiful things of the city, and the process generates empathy for them towards the city. Moreover, film making is a hot topic which many people want to learn. Therefore, it would be an interesting topic to gather participants.
I invited my friend Shoyo Miyao - a professional videographer - as the instructor and mentor on film making.

Participants : 5 high school students, 5 university students from inside and outside of Minamiuonuma city (voluntary)
Time: Feb. 10th-12th, 2018 (3 consecutive days)
Objective: participants in groups produce short commercials for Minamiuonuma by applying the perspectives of film making explained during workshops. Through commercial making, they are able to re-evaluate Minamiuonuma city as a city they are more related to than before.

Materials: smartphones that can film, 1 Macbook/group with iMovie installed.

Day 1:

• Commercial making workshop: introduction to the format and structure of commercials using examples.
• Visit to local snow festival.
• Fireside chat with local innovators: we invited many local innovators in different fields (IT, winery, manufacturing, tourism, food, etc.) to chat about their career choice, especially how they decided to work in the city while having the choice to work in bigger cities.
• Group mentoring.

Day 2:

• Commercial making workshop: composition and camera work, copy writing.
• Field work.
• Dinner cooking with local chef.
• Group mentoring.

Day 3:

• Group work to finish up the video.
• Screening party.