How to get a year of material from one thing

We were hired to create a year's worth of social media content for the firm Field Paoli Architects celebrating its 40th anniversary.

‍

Our first instinct, which would have been the wrong one, was to figure out what to post every week for a year.Instead we spent three days filming.

‍

We sat with Dave Paoli, one of the two founders, who spoke about the early days of the firm with a clarity and warmth that surprised us. We went through forty years of archives. Pencil and ink drawings, the kind that would have been rolled out on a conference table to show a client what their building was going to feel like before a single foundation was poured. Client presentations that had become history.

‍

We turned all of it into a short documentary. The kind of piece that lives on a website and rewards the people who find it.

‍

And then we went back into the footage and pulled. Thirty-second clips of the partners talking about what shared urban spaces are for. A three-second flipbook of archival drawings morphing into the firm's logo. Before and after sequences contrasting the original pencil sketches with photography of the finished spaces. Animated renders from the firm's more recent work.

‍

By the end we had enough short-form content to post a few times a month for a year. Every piece pointed back to the documentary. Every piece was a door into the same world.This is the thing people often get backwards about content. They start with the posts. A bunch of posts, each one created from scratch, each one requiring its own idea and its own energy.

‍

The better question is: what is the one deep thing we could make that contains everything? And then: how many ways can we find to open it?