The Muncie Delaware County Chamber of Commerce enlisted the video expertise of Fusework Studios in 2004 to create a “quality of life” video that could be sent to or shown to prospective employers who were considering locating a business in the community. The competition for new jobs is fierce in today’s business climate and the video has been very successful in telling the right kind of story for Muncie.
Fast forward to today and Muncie, like many communities, finds themselves courting business from Japan. The city had made an annual trip to Japan to meet with emerging and expanding businesses there in an attempt to land their business. And even though the video piece was still fresh, much was lost in the translation and the Chamber wanted to take another step to bridge the communication gap.
Solution
The Muncie Chamber came back to Fusework Studios and enlisted us to help. Our company has experience in a variety of translation projects so we knew this could be done relatively quickly without much disruption of the product in editing. However, as usual, we decided to go beyond the expectations of the client and truly make the project a winner.
The video was re-edited using the same footage but the American hosts were replaced with Japanese on-camera talent. In addition, several sequences of community members were re-shot to more prominently feature the growing Asian population in Muncie. Then the entire video narrative along with on-screen graphics and titles were also redone in Japanese. The video is now part of a campaign that was recently awarded a national honor by the International Economic Development Alliance. Best of all, the campaign has been extremely well received by the Japanese business community as a gesture of cooperation and respect for their investment on U.S. soil and Muncie is poised to land important new jobs.