Locally Grown is a branded content series Jewel-Osco has been creating with Tribune Publishing for several years. The series highlights some of the numerous brands Jewel-Osco works with to provide their shoppers a wide variety of high-quality grocery options. All the brands featured in the series are local to the region.

The series is crafted in a documentary style and features the brand’s people talking about their relationship with Jewel-Osco and their connection to the Chicagoland market. Effectively crafting this series relies on getting strong interviews. It would be easy to scratch the surface and just get some platitudes and remarks about Jewl-Osco and Chicagoland presence. To me, that’s not enough or particularly interesting. For these interviews, the objective was to push past the initial responses related to what and how and get to substantive content. These stories really need as much emotion as possible to really craft an impression of optimism and opportunity resulting from the collaborative relationship between the two brands. The connection and shared values between the featured brand, Jewel-Osco and the community needs to be thoroughly developed to craft meaning in the story. And it all had to be done in less than 1:45.

Production of these videos was limited to one shoot day and up to six days of edit time per video. Crews for these shoots consisted of two cameras, an audio mixer and a grip. For these three films, I was the producer and director.

To see additional branded content, or social video and pre-roll ads, see my film & video page.