Reflecting on 10 Years of Projects at Swng Productions

Ten years. A lot can happen in a decade.

When Swng Productions was founded in Austin, Texas in 2016, the way brands approached video looked considerably different than it does today. Instagram Stories had only just launched. TikTok didn’t exist yet. Vertical video wasn’t something production teams necessarily planned entire shoots around. And terms like Reels, AI-generated content, virtual production, and creator marketing weren’t yet part of the everyday marketing vocabulary.

A lot has changed.

But one thing hasn’t: great video starts with a great story.

Over the past 10 years, we’ve had the opportunity to tell a lot of them.

We’ve worked with global technology companies, Texas institutions, national brands, nonprofits, schools, startups, artists, agencies, celebrities, and organizations doing genuinely interesting things. We’ve traveled for productions, built sets, filmed on LED stages, created animation, captured live events, produced commercials, developed social campaigns, interviewed people from all walks of life, and solved more unexpected production challenges than we can count.

Through it all, our goal has remained pretty simple: create high-quality, purpose-driven content that helps our clients communicate clearly and accomplish something meaningful.

As Swng Productions celebrates our 10-year anniversary on September 12, 2026, we’re looking back at 10 projects that represent different chapters of that journey – and looking ahead at where we believe video marketing is going next!

1. IDEA Public Schools: Going Big for the Super Bowl

Producing a Super Bowl commercial is the type of project that sticks with you.

IDEA Public Schools came to Swng to create its 2020 Super Bowl ad celebrating the organization’s 20th anniversary while showcasing the academics, activities, and opportunities available to its students.

It was an ambitious production. We planned more than 13 unique scenes, ranging from basketball to science classrooms, while coordinating around real students and school schedules. The creative needed to feel energetic and inspiring while meeting the production standards viewers expect from a commercial airing during one of television’s biggest events.

And it worked.

After airing in local markets during the Super Bowl, IDEA reported a 26% increase in enrollment applications!

That project remains a great example of something we’ve believed from the beginning: a beautiful video is great, but a beautiful video that produces a measurable result for the client is even better.

2. Whataburger: Finding Creative Solutions Behind the Camera

As a Texas-based production company, getting the opportunity to work on a campaign involving Whataburger was naturally a fun one.

Working alongside advertising agency McGarrah Jessee, Swng helped bring the “Funded by Friday” hiring campaign to life.

One of the campaign’s creative concepts called for employees to transition from their Whataburger uniforms into outfits representing something they could purchase with their earnings. Pulling that off convincingly – and within a tight two-day production schedule – required some creative problem-solving of our own.

Instead of spending an entire Texas summer day filming talent in a restaurant parking lot, we captured exterior plate shots of a local Whataburger and filmed talent on a studio greenscreen. Post-production brought the elements together to create the final effect. The larger campaign also included seven distinct indoor and outdoor setups for Instagram content, complete with carefully designed lighting, props, art direction, and camera movement.

It’s a reminder that production isn’t simply about having the fanciest equipment. Sometimes the best solution comes from asking: How can we execute the creative more efficiently without sacrificing the idea?

3. Grove Co. x Drew Barrymore: Thinking Mobile-First

Working with Grove Collaborative and Drew Barrymore represented another important evolution in the type of content brands were asking us to create.

The assignment wasn’t simply to produce a polished celebrity campaign. The content needed to feel authentic to Drew’s personality and Grove Co.’s sustainable homecare products while also looking completely natural on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.

Instead of producing a traditional horizontal commercial and cropping it later, we tested a Sony FX6 in a vertical rig and approached production with the final social platforms in mind from the beginning.

The campaign eventually generated more than 1.6 million views on Grove’s Instagram page.

It’s a philosophy that has become increasingly important to our work: where a video will live should influence how a video is made. Great social content shouldn’t look like an afterthought or a commercial awkwardly squeezed into a phone screen. It should feel like it belongs there.

4. Meta x HubSpot x The Fives: Making Technology Feel Human

Some of our favorite projects involve taking something technically complicated and finding the human story hiding inside it.

For a case study featuring Meta, HubSpot, and The Fives Resort in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, that meant explaining new technology integrations without making the audience feel like they were watching a software demo.

We developed the script around the actual customer experience – from discovering an advertisement on Facebook to booking a room and ultimately enjoying the resort.

The production combined interviews with carefully designed lifestyle scenes and was created in both English and Spanish to serve multiple markets.

It reinforced a lesson that’s only become more relevant as technology has grown more complicated: people don’t necessarily want to hear about technology. They want to understand what technology allows people to do. That’s an important distinction, and one we expect to matter even more over the next decade.

5. Making Reels with Instagram and Meta: One Production, 31 Videos

Few projects illustrate the changing video landscape better than our educational Reels series with Meta.

The goal was to help small businesses and creators understand how to use Instagram Reels while giving them practical ideas for incorporating Reels into their own content strategies.

Instead of thinking about the campaign as one hero video, we approached it as an entire content library. Swng produced six high-level instructional videos and 25 supporting cutdowns – 31 videos in total. We filmed the series over three days on an LED soundstage in Austin, using virtual environments to create colorful sets and numerous looks efficiently.

This project represented a major shift we’ve continued to see across video marketing. Brands aren’t necessarily asking, “What’s the video?” They’re asking, “What’s the content system?” How can one production create a hero asset, paid ads, organic social content, educational clips, vertical cutdowns, website content, and other useful pieces? That’s where strategic production planning creates tremendous value.

6. DUPR: Building a Brand Around a Growing Sport

Long before pickleball seemed to be everywhere, DUPR – Dreamland Universal Pickleball Rating – came to Swng to create a video campaign for the launch of its brand and app at the 2021 US Pickleball Open.The campaign needed to introduce the brand while explaining its product and generating awareness among an audience passionate about the sport.

We developed high-quality commercial content designed to work across pickleball livestreams, social media, and DUPR’s website. Looking back, it’s a project that demonstrates the importance of meeting a growing community where it already spends its time, since not every campaign needs to speak to everyone.

Sometimes the best marketing comes from understanding a specific audience incredibly well, creating something that feels like it belongs in their world, and distributing it through the channels they already use.

7. Big Medium: Telling Stories in Our Own Austin Community

For all the opportunities we’ve had to work with national and international brands, Austin has always been an important part of Swng’s identity. Our work with Big Medium, an Austin nonprofit supporting local artists, is a project we’re particularly happy to include in this 10-year reflection.

Big Medium needed promotional videos for its East and West Austin Studio Tours that could introduce new audiences to the events while creating an emotional connection with the artists themselves. The challenge was balancing both objectives. The videos needed to promote the Studio Tours, but the artists couldn’t feel secondary to the event.

Through visually driven, documentary-style storytelling, we created content designed to showcase the people, spaces, and creative process behind Austin’s artistic community while remaining accessible for online audiences.

Ten years in Austin has given us plenty of reasons to appreciate the creative community around us, and projects like this remind us that some of the best stories are right in our backyard!

8. Amazon RSR Corpus Christi: Finding the Story Inside Innovation

When Amazon introduced its RSR+ pilot facility in Corpus Christi, Swng was brought in to tell the story primarily to an internal audience.

The facility was designed to improve delivery speeds for rural customers while creating new opportunities for employee development. But rather than focusing exclusively on logistics, processes, and facilities, we centered much of the story around people.

Across two days of filming, we captured interviews with associates discussing career growth, footage showcasing the facility’s capabilities, and delivery drivers traveling through the rural communities the program was designed to serve. The result illustrates something we’ve learned producing case studies, testimonials, recruiting content, and corporate videos:

B2B and internal communications don’t have to feel corporate.

Companies are made of people. Customers are people. Employees are people.

If you can find the human consequence of a business decision or technological innovation, you’ve probably found the better story.

9. Texas DSHS Folic Acid PSA: Using Animation to Make Important Information Accessible

Video doesn’t always need a camera.

For the Texas Department of State Health Services, Swng was tasked with making important medical information about folic acid approachable and memorable for younger women. Animation gave us an opportunity to do that differently.

Working with animator Reid Hildebrand, we developed expressive and inclusive characters representing different skin tones and body types while writing scripts that communicated health information without falling into the traditional dry PSA format. Texas-specific details, like the Houston skyline, helped give the campaign a sense of place. We ultimately produced a 90-second video and two 30-second variations in both English and Spanish, creating six deliverables. The videos were also tested with WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) participants in both languages before being displayed in clinics throughout Texas.

It was a reminder that the right visual language depends entirely on the story you’re trying to tell. Live action, animation, motion graphics, documentary storytelling, commercial production; they’re all different tools used to achieve the same goal.

10. DrumWave: Building an Entire Brand Launch Around One Big Idea

Some projects are about producing a video. Others ask you to build an entire world. For DrumWave’s brand launch, Swng Productions had the opportunity to do the latter.

DrumWave was preparing to debut its dWallet® and Data Savings Plan at the 2025 Money20/20 fintech conference,  introducing products designed around a concept that was still unfamiliar to many consumers: giving people greater control over, and the ability to benefit from, their own data.

The challenge was figuring out how to make something as abstract as personal data feel tangible, exciting, and human.

Working with directing duo The Kummerl Twins, we developed the campaign around a simple idea: “Your Life, Your Story, Your Data.” From there, things got big quickly.

With only six weeks to prepare, our team coordinated a highly complex production involving a large crew, custom physical builds, multiple environments, virtual production, talent, props, lighting, visual effects, photography, and extensive post-production. Over four production days, we used an LED soundstage and a mix of practical and digital environments to create a colorful, hyper-visual world designed to introduce DrumWave with a distinctive personality.

But we weren’t building the campaign around a single hero video. Every shot was planned with repurposing and scalability in mind. The production ultimately generated more than 40 deliverables, including six-second loops, 15-second teasers, character- and theme-specific cutdowns, and promotional content designed for multiple platforms, placements, and aspect ratios. And the project didn’t end when production wrapped.

Swng also led DrumWave’s new website from the ground up, including strategy, UX, visual design, development, SEO, and original copywriting. The goal was to create a digital home that carried the same visual language and personality as the launch campaign while helping audiences understand DrumWave’s new product system.

Looking back over 10 years of Swng projects, DrumWave represents how much the definition of “video production” has expanded.

Today’s best campaigns don’t necessarily exist as one commercial, one website, or one social video. They’re interconnected creative systems where video, photography, design, digital experiences, and brand strategy all reinforce one another. For us, DrumWave was a chance to bring all of those disciplines together, and a glimpse at the kind of integrated creative work we expect to see much more of in Swng’s next decade.

What Will the Next 10 Years of Video Marketing Look Like?

Looking through 10 years of projects makes one thing obvious: video marketing isn’t standing still. The platforms will continue to change. Production technology will evolve. New tools will emerge.

We’re excited about all of it!

A few things we’re confident about heading into the next decade: production will become more platform-native, with creative teams asking where content will live before deciding how to make it. One shoot will need to do more: generating hero content, paid ads, social cutdowns, and supporting assets from a single production day. AI will change the workflow, but taste, strategy, and originality will matter more because of it, not less. And human stories will remain the most powerful thing a brand can put on screen, no matter how the tools evolve.

The fundamentals won’t change. Great ideas still matter. So will good writing, thoughtful direction, and knowing your audience.

Here’s to the Next 10

It’s hard to summarize 10 years through only 10 projects. We’re grateful for every production, every client, every crew member, and every collaborator who has been part of this ride. We’re also much more interested in what comes next.

Here’s to the stories we’ve told, and all the ones we haven’t made yet. Ready to create something with Swng? Let’s make the next one together.