A campaign video for Minnesota 4-H and the State Fair building everyone loves

Minnesota 4-H wanted a video to carry its $35 million capital campaign to renovate the 4-H Building at the State Fair, a creaky, beloved barn of a place where thousands of kids have slept, shown animals and grown up a little over twelve days each August. Lindsey Seavert and I produced it; Renny McCauley edited.

The core of the piece is people telling us how 4-H changed their lives. We shot those interviews where the stories happened, which meant filming in the middle of the fair while a river of humanity walked past. We boomed a shotgun mic overhead, picked our backgrounds for depth and let the noise be part of the texture. The result sounds like the fair and feels like the fair, which is the point.

There was a lot of back and forth with the client and the State Fair's marketing team, and a few of my favorite moments did not survive it. That is the job. A campaign video has one purpose, and the piece we delivered does that purpose well. The fair is sacred to a lot of Minnesotans, and I enjoyed every day of working with the 4-H staff to say so.

If you are a nonprofit or a university program with a capital campaign ahead, this is the kind of video that does real work in a room full of donors. I am glad to talk through how we would shoot yours.