Charter & Co’s Approach to Modern Brand Storytelling

The state of video marketing and production has shifted drastically in today's digital age, with greater emphasis on more videos that are more immersive and tell stories with a human touch.  

Using our market-driven insights and experience with leading brands, Charter & Co continues to evolve to keep up with industry demands and businesses' needs. Our latest addition, Forge Virtual Studios, a virtual production studio, upholds our commitment to clarity, brand storytelling, and creative integrity by maximizing what our production teams can achieve. 

Learn about what's new at Charter & Co and why we adopted some of the modern film industry's most advanced technology. 

The Problem Modern Brands Can't Ignore Anymore

Consistency and clarity are essential to maintaining your brand identity and message as you scale your video marketing. Scale without clarity can lead audiences to interpret your message differently based on which videos they see first. Inconsistent branding also makes it harder for viewers to remember your previous content when they see new videos, limiting your long-term marketing impact.

A proactive video production strategy helps you control your brand's message and identity in every video. This way, you can safely scale your video marketing alongside the rest of your business without eroding your brand meaning.

"The challenge today isn’t producing more content. It’s producing clarity at scale—without losing what makes a brand human... When storytelling breaks down, it’s rarely a creative problem. It’s a systems problem—and systems need to evolve.” 

— Drew English, President, Charter & Co.

Brand consistency is especially crucial given the fragmented ecosystem of digital video marketing. Your target audiences will most likely encounter your video content across various platforms, such as LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube. This can make it challenging to deliver the same message to everyone. 

The answer? A pre-defined, tailored messaging strategy. 

Some marketing teams approach video content with a "scale vs. humanity" mindset, assuming that automation and virtual production technology will always limit the content's authenticity. While this may be true in some instances, technology can effectively enhance your emotional impact when you use it correctly. In fact, technology and "movie magic" have enhanced the sense of realism in videos throughout most of film history. When used correctly, digital backgrounds and visual effects (VFX) look as real as anything else on the screen, which can enhance your content's authenticity and humanity.

Why the Traditional Production Model No Longer Works

Modern video marketing requires lots of content to stay on top of competitive social media algorithms and keep your brand on viewers' minds. Of course, you must still prioritize quality, even when scaling quantity. This requires a level of video production that legacy production models no longer support, inspiring many marketing teams to partner with virtual production studios. 

Scalability is particularly important for business-to-business (B2B) marketing. Potential clients may not be in the market for your products or services when they first see your videos. But a consistent content strategy can help them remember you and give you more time to establish your brand's credibility. 

Workflow Friction

Investing in the right tools and talent supports your internal production team's growth, but even a large, skilled crew may not be able to meet all of today's marketing demands. Workflow friction — not talent — is the real bottleneck limiting video marketing scalability. 

What slows down video production?

• Tight deadlines

• Repetitive tasks

• Lengthy video renders

• Unplanned setbacks

These issues can potentially delay distribution, limit the revisions you can request, and make certain project ideas practically unattainable. 

The bottom line: Traditional video production doesn't cut it anymore.

Supporting Scalability With New Systems

Virtual video production models and other new systems offer solutions to keep up with today's demanding video market without sacrificing quality. Modern technology can automate steps, help you achieve more in the studio, and replace old, inefficient tools. This fast, real-time production can help you achieve your vision faster and, perhaps, better than you could have achieved before. 

Rethinking Production as Brand Infrastructure

Virtual production studios are actively defining the future of video marketing and production, but what is a virtual production studio? These modern studios use light-emitting diode (LED) walls that can simulate practically any background, atmosphere, or setting that you can imagine — no green screen needed. These physical studio spaces let you blend interior and exterior settings entirely from an indoor space, ensuring rain, snow, and the sun's movement don't disrupt your production or continuity. 

Lucasfilm first popularized this type of technology in the Disney+ series The Mandalorian. This series maximized its budget and production potential by using "The Volume," a 270-degree curved LED screen wall that served as a moving backdrop. This way, the production team only needed to prep the VFX and set dressing to bring alien locations to life rather than fly the cast and crew to different locations around the world.

Ditching the Green Screen

In a virtual video production studio, the lack of a green or blue screen also significantly boosts your creative capabilities and your video's quality. Now, you can capture high-quality videos with engaging backgrounds in real-time, whether you're livestreaming or working on a tight deadline. 

Without expert filming and editing, green screens can leave a distracting green border around people and objects. Plus, a green or blue screen can limit the colors you can use when filming, since anything that matches the screen's color could be erased in post-production. 

A virtual production studio gives you more creative control over your props, wardrobes, set dressing, and overall brand presence. The light from LED screens ensures that the colors, shadows, and lighting on your subjects fit the background environment — so you get professional quality without fiddling with camera light balances and a green screen. 

Converting Virtual Production Into a Strategic System

Virtual video production is more than a technical novelty. It's a strategic system that can help you balance video quality and quantity while preserving a cohesive brand image. For instance, using a digital background guarantees you can maintain the same color schemes and backgrounds across every video. 

The best virtual production studios can save you the time and effort of resetting a traditional studio to pick up where your last videos left off. Instead, you can reuse your virtual backgrounds, assets, and workflows whenever you want, whether you're launching a new campaign or you need to reshoot previous videos with updated information.

What Changed for Charter & Co

As a Chicago-based, full-service production company, Charter & Co has worked with a multitude of clients and brand leaders across markets. Our unique experience and observations have helped us learn the most significant needs, goals, and setbacks of modern video marketing. 

Charter & Co identified that consistency at scale remains one of the most significant concerns for corporate video production. We aim to help marketing teams achieve their goals quickly and affordably while staying as true to the original vision as possible with our new LED virtual production studio. By listening to clients' needs and virtual production studio recommendations, Charter & Co believes that Forge Virtual Studios will help maintain clarity, precision, and humanity in video content. 

Why Forge Virtual Studios Was the Inevitable Next Step

Forge Virtual Studios is a natural extension of Charter & Co's services, along with our long-standing philosophy of supporting businesses with quality brand-tailored content. Virtual production puts creative control back into your hands so you can craft your video exactly as you envisioned it. 

Storytelling and Immersion

This storytelling infrastructure can help you connect to viewers emotionally without breaking the immersion. Effective storytelling is especially important in the modern video marketing industry. Viewers want to see people, success stories, and solutions that they can relate to, so the most successful content feels real and down-to-earth. 

High-quality virtual production expands your creative potential without any mistakes or green screen borders taking viewers out of the story. 

Scalability and Cost Effectiveness

The clarity, consistency, and creative freedom of virtual production studios are especially beneficial for scalability. Reusing brand colors and backgrounds with an LED background screen saves you time, lowers your virtual production studio cost, and gives you more space to focus on your messaging. 

Filming on location can get expensive, depending on where you're filming. Production teams often have to manage location scouting days, permits, back-up locations, transportation, on-site arrangements, and other complex logistics. Additionally, unpredictable weather can interrupt and delay your production days, and ever-changing lighting conditions can make your final video look inconsistent. 

While leading virtual production studios charge more than basic studios and sound stages, the price is still typically lower than the cost of filming on-site — especially if you need multiple locations and filming days. Now, you can capture all of your footage in the same studio space, slashing the cost of transportation, permits, and other logistics. 

You can further reduce your costs over time by working with the same virtual production studios. Forge Virtual Studios' professional teams will save your assets and remember your workflow so you can pick up exactly where you left off during your last campaign. 

What This Means for Brands Moving Forward

Virtual production studios such as Forge Virtual Studios push the limits of what corporate marketing teams can achieve. Now, you can stop worrying about weather, logistics, lighting, and continuity and focus solely on your video and brand image, even as you scale your operations.

Get in touch with Forge Virtual Studios and Charter & Co to learn more about how modern video technology can benefit your marketing campaign.