Creating Videos for Your Department

Departments can create videos that support their programs, services, events, research and outreach. Videos should align with Stony Brook University's brand standards, accessibility requirements and communications best practices.

The guidance below outlines when to involve your school's communications office, when to contact the Office of Marketing and Communications (MARCOM), and how to publish videos appropriately.

Start with Your School or Unit Communications Manager

If you are creating a promotional video for an individual program, department, center or initiative, your first point of contact should always be your school or unit's communications manager.

Find your comms manager by school:

If additional guidance is needed, your communications manager will coordinate with MARCOM.

Video Content Standards

Videos should be accurate and up to date, reflect Stony Brook University's brand and reputation, use professional language and imagery, be appropriate for the intended audience and respect copyright and licensing requirements for music, images, graphics and other media.

Available Assets

Please find lower thirds (Premiere file formats), end logos, and prism graphics in this Google Drive. More details on brand guidelines can be found here.

When to Contact MARCOM

MARCOM should be consulted for projects when they involve university-wide campaigns, videos representing the university as a whole, the university president or other senior university leadership, major recruitment or enrollment marketing initiatives or when there are institutional brand guideline questions.

Creating a YouTube Channel

Departments may establish an official YouTube presence when there is an ongoing need to publish video content.

Before creating a new channel, consider whether:

An existing university or school YouTube channel would better serve your audience.
Your department has the resources to regularly maintain the channel.
You are able to meet Title II accessibility guidelines for your videos.

Department channels should:

Be owned by a shared departmental Google account rather than an individual employee.
Have multiple administrators whenever possible.
Use official Stony Brook brand guidelines.
Include an accurate channel description and links to the department website.

Accessibility Requirements

All publicly available videos must meet Title II and university accessibility requirements.

In order to be accessible, YouTube videos must include captions that reflect all audio information, including sound effects or music, and identify speakers. YouTube will generate captions for most videos subsequent to upload, but machine-generated captions may be inaccurate and will require editing. University of Minnesota provides useful information on creating accessible video captions in YouTube.

If the video includes visual information that is needed to understand what the video is communicating (e.g., athlete demonstrates how to lift weights safely) it is necessary to include an audible description of that information on the video soundtrack. Creating and cross-linking an audio-described alternative version of the original video is an acceptable solution. The audio-described version should be posted at the same time as the original version. Examples:

Publishing Videos on stonybrook.edu

The preferred method for displaying videos on university websites is by embedding them from YouTube using the approved video component within the Modern Campus CMS.

Embedding videos improves website performance and avoids uploading large files directly into the CMS.

Questions?

For questions about messaging or communications strategy, contact your school or unit communications manager.

For questions about university branding, digital standards or website implementation, your communications manager can coordinate with the Office of Marketing and Communications (MARCOM) as needed.