The UOC web series chosen as the best audiovisual project in Spain

The UOC’s Internal Communications team came up with a five-episode series to convey the institution’s values to teaching staff, researchers and administrative staff. The result was A series of values, featuring some forty employees who volunteered to appear as actors and extras under the direction of actor Roger Coma. Produced in 2017, the project was recently selected as one of the best audiovisual projects in Spain by the European Association for Internal Communication. The winners will be announced on 22 November in the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana.

The UOC initiative featured five episodes, each covering one of the University’s five values.

• Episode 1. The tupper: the value of respect
• Episode 2. The t-shirts: the value of commitment
• Episode 3. The newbie: the value of transparency
• Episode 4. The photocopier: the value of sustainability
• Episode 5. The meeting: the value of professionalism

The forty or so actors are all UOC employees, while parts of the script are also ideas from administrative and academic staff. Some months before recording the series, a participation process was put in motion with a two-fold purpose: recruit actors and generate ideas for the script. The response was very encouraging: forty would-be actors and extras volunteered and about thirty proposals were received for the script. Thus, the five episodes are the result of a project that enabled the UOC’s values and associated behaviours to be disseminated progressively among all employees. All episodes beat viewing records for in-house videos, with over 700 visits each.

Each of these five episodes lasts for about four minutes and is available in three languages (Catalan, Spanish and English), in line with the goal of advancing toward a global University. The entire series – from writing the script and the initial casting to direction, recording and editing – was produced by a team of professionals led by the actor, scriptwriter, producer and director Roger Coma.

“This commission was about values and behaviour, and I thought it would be perfect to approach it using comedy”, Coma explained. “It revolves around realism, but through the use of humour, with a lot of the liberties that humour demands, such as surrealism. It’s a web series in the sense that they are five-minute capsules that are quick to watch, especially on a mobile”.

For the UOC’s Internal Communications director, Arnau Cillero, “it is an honour to have led a project such as this. Being bold and doing things differently often reaps rewards, and this is a great example of exactly that”. In the words of Lluís Rius, director of Communications, “the most important thing about the campaign was that it gave us a chance to reveal or shine a light on UOC values, bringing them to life, which is what we were after”.

The UOC will be vying for the honour alongside the following the finalists: 

• BNP PARIBAS FORTIS (BNP Paribas Fortis Thankathon Event)
• KBC GROUP (Out of balance)
• ÖBB-INFRASTRUKTUR (infra:100)
• SWISS LIFE (Actively shaping your career)