I'm a member of an online advisory group called Adobe Creative Advisors Community. It was created by Adobe in partnership with the customer collaboration agency, C Space, and has about 300 working creative professional members. As a member of the community, I get to be an ongoing advisor to Adobe by sharing my feedback, generating ideas for future products, and shaping better experiences with the brand. Pretty cool. 

The Adobe research team was preparing to present customer input at a strategic meeting with product leads who were focused on the designer community. The team wanted to kick off that meeting with video messages from select creative community members. I was chosen to participate by Adobe and C Space because of my participation in the community. I was honored! 

The guidelines were few and the time to produce the video was little. The research team at Adobe was asking me to create a very short, but thoughtfully lively video using a smartphone or even a laptop. The video should answer three questions

        Adobe should start doing...

        Adobe should continue doing...

        Last but not least, Adobe should stop doing...

A final ask was that the video didn’t feel like I was just reading the questions and then answering them from an off-screen script. The team didn’t want the message to feel scripted, but as genuine as possible. 

Before recording my video message, I took a few hours to pray and think through my answers. They were good questions and created a great opportunity to get honest with Adobe about my experiences and perspective. But there wasn’t a lot of time to cover details or share everything I thought. In the end, my simple message needed to be concise, authentic, helpful, and energetic.

I wrote out my answers to each question and set it up on an old iPad next to my iPhone – which sat on a tripod. I practiced my responses a bit, but knew I didn’t have the time to familiar enough with the words to film a continuous shot. I didn’t prefer the choppy cuts, but I figured they’d add to the authenticity of the video, as opposed to the feel of a polished production.

In the video, I’m sitting in a favorite space of my apartment building called The Conservatory. It’s mostly sunlight and filled with plants. I was there for the light, but the background created a nice scene. 

Once the segments were filmed, I packed up and headed to my old iMac to stitch everything together in Adobe Premiere. I enjoy the process of assembling a video - marking the best takes, finding the right transitions, refining the audio in Adobe Audition. There’s a peacefulness to the process, but I kept a quick and decisive pace to make the short deadline. 

At the end of my editing, with questions answered thoughtfully and the video not feeling like a staged studio production, I was happy with the message and submitted it to C Space and research team at Adobe. It’s too bad I wasn’t present to see the how my words impacted the conversation about Adobe product ideas or informed leaders about the perspectives and experiences of designers like me. But I believe it helped and will keep an eye out for new experiences that ring familiar.