Third Wave Coffee Ethics

 

When Fact & Fable Productions was called to develop this series (12 videos) for Roast House Coffee, it was inevitable that ‘cycling’ would be represented as they are all bikers.  So I combined the concept of a testimonial drawn from a high profile company,

David’s Pizza, who participate in one of the most active cycling events in Spokane.  Then I took the opportunity to layer this video by having the Roast Master, David Rier, explain how he developed the roast for the ‘Ride the Edge’ brand.  This way the video accomplishes several tasks while the viewer experiences a seamless transmission of information….which ‘entertains while it informs.’

Firstly I wanted to capture the viewers attention and I know I only have mini seconds to accomplish this, so I set out to create an ‘intro’ that would grab the viewer by reminding them of the sights, sounds, and smells in a coffee house.  Sense attention raised and captured, I use the platform to say what I came to say and the ‘teaching moment’ begins.

Cutting directly into the experience of someone who is having an enjoyable, energetic, vitalizing ride, somewhere where they feel free and connected to nature and their passion to promote all things good for the environment. Hence, blossoms, windmills, birds, and fruitful fields.

You learn a bit about coffee roasting, the 24 Hour Cycling Event held annually in Spokane, is framed out and used to boast about how well loved this brand of coffee is (and it’s true, by the way) then you have Mark Starr, owner of David’s Pizza, probably the best known pizza in town.  This sort of video production becomes a very effective SEO tool.  For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s short hand for ‘search engine optimization’; the words you type into a search bar like Google, links to the content of such videos and that is how they pop up on a search.  This is the whole advertising & marketing objective when producing a branding video and publishing it on your website, within the social media network and of course on all the free web portals, YouTube, chief among them.

Since the brand of coffee is called: ‘Ride the Edge’ I followed their lead by using disorientating angles and sometimes the point of view of a cyclist. The sound track was created for this production and it communicates ‘drive’ and ‘driven.  The inter-cut images of the wind power mills, which not only stands as a symbol of the ‘greener’ lifestyle, cycling factors into, but it’s a wheel and driven by the wind.  Using graphics of a hospital’s heart monitor and altering the colours of the pounding heart is to simulate the heightened energy the coffee drinker experiences while they ‘Ride the Edge’.

The final message communicated in this video is the double meaning conveyed in ‘Ride the Edge’; this fledgling company is doing exactly that!  The mini testimonial delivered by the guy wearing the ‘Ride the Edge’ tee shirt tops it off by telling the viewer how good this brand of coffee tastes whether you drink it hot or cold. He endorses the coffee and I have him do it and not the pizza place owner because he’s ‘one with the viewer’, perceived to be ‘one of us’.

I hope that explains a bit of how and why I included the components I did for this website video.

As far as we know the only company in the Pacific Northwest that exclusively, buy, roast, and sell, not only shade grown organic, but only from small collective farms that they actually know, is Roast House Coffee.  It’s a fascinating product: second only to oil in volume as a traded commodity on the stock exchange, highly political as most coffee plantations are owned by American pharmaceutical companies, and over 1,000 pesticides are used in the cultivation of non-organic coffee. There is so much to say about the entire process of ‘Crop to Cup’ coffee and I also touch on that by creating a simple graphic at the end.

http://RoastHouseCoffee.net