Psychology

Our deep understanding allows us to capture the essence of your story.

One of our greatest passions is the art of asking questions the right way, at the right time. We love the intuition behind it and then the actual crafting of the sentence itself. Asking good questions and listening well is truly a talent that takes years of honing to do just right. We’re kind of nerds about it - always watching others with so much more experience (Erin Moriarity and Peter Van Sant!) and then talking through their techniques with our team. There’s nothing like the thrill of hearing someone ask the perfect question that elicits an insightful or emotional response that no one saw coming.

When Kristin started at Reliant, she naturally brought this discipline with her from the psychology world. She takes our team through workshops on asking questions, on-camera interviewing and listening. This helps us whether we are developing a scripted concept or choosing real stories to tell. The result has been that nearly every client we work with walks away saying, “I feel like you understood us. We finally have a video that captures the essence of who we are.”

A lot of companies say they listen, but we are actually taught how to listen and how to prompt, and we take time to translate this into understanding. Because once we understand, we can begin the process of creatively sharing who you are with the world! 

Journalism

We relentlessly pursue finding your best stories.

Many moons ago, we used to rely on our clients to supply storytellers for their videos. Sometimes this worked out well, but a lot of the time we walked away with one of three things: 

1. A great story, but maybe this particular story didn’t quite fit with the goals the organization hoped to accomplish with this particular video.

2. A hole in the story, because maybe we interviewed three people, but only two were usable.

3. Confusion because no one told a great story and we were scrambling with how to make something from nothing.

We weren’t serving anyone well, and we decided to take matters into our own hands. Thus, our pre-interview process was born! We ask our clients for a list of potential storytellers and we dig in, getting to know each and every story ahead of time - through either an in-person or video chat. We get to align stories with the video’s goals, find the most emotionally powerful storytellers and in some cases, we have to search beyond that initial list to find your organization’s hidden gems. 

We are relentless because we know your best storytellers are out there and sometimes we will “go rogue” to find them (with your permission, of course!) because we want you to have the most amazing video possible. We want to be your partner in story discovery and often, our clients take what we find and use it for other big initiatives!

Filmmaking

We value emotional connections, motivated direction and beautiful cinematography.

When we started Reliant in 2005, we were definitely a typical “video production company.” Not a ton of pre-production. No art direction. Lots of talking heads. And all of our camera gear and lighting equipment fit in the back of a Volvo wagon. We were a team of three and we were all “jacks of all trades.” We all lit, shot, edited, etc.

But there is this timeless allure of the film industry. It’s an industry with a meticulous attention to details. It’s an industry filled with “specialists” who are experts in each of the small parts they play in making something beautiful and moving. So we slowly started adding filmmaking techniques to what we were already doing. We created a thorough pre-production process. We started working with and started hiring specialists. We took some risks and bought a truck full of lighting and grip equipment and brought a gaffer (lighting specialist) to each of our shoots whether big or small. 

Fast forward to today - we are now a team of specialists. With a mixture of our in-house team and our growing network of film professionals, we have dedicated producers, directors, cinematographers, sound technicians, grips, editors, colorists and many more specialists we can bring in when needed. We do it this way because we believe filmmaking (combined with psychology and journalism) causes our clients to make deep and powerful connections with their audiences.