Reflecting on a Year of Brand Production at the University of Otago
At the end of 2025, Best Apisit Uthakhamkong wrote a reflection on the year as Brand Content Producer and Team Leader at the University of Otago. He shares what it was really like to lead a small creative team through a big year of production, what he learned, and why he is grateful to everyone who was part of it.
What did Best Apisit Uthakhamkong reflect on at the end of 2025. Writing as Brand Producer and Video Producer at the University of Otago, Uthakhamkong used a year-end reflection to describe what it was actually like to lead a small creative team through a demanding twelve months of brand and video production, rather than presenting a polished highlights reel disconnected from the effort behind it.
A year inside the Brand Content team is not easily measured in months. It is better measured in what actually gets made: the graduate story that helps a prospective student picture themselves on campus, the research video that makes complex science feel human and accessible, the event highlight reel that captures what a single day on campus genuinely feels like to be part of. In 2025, the team produced a large volume of that kind of content, and Uthakhamkong is openly proud of the results while remaining honest about what it cost the people who made it.
The Brand Content team sits within the University of Otago’s Creative Services division. Throughout 2025, and particularly in the second half of the year, it operated as a small, tightly stretched unit. Being small did not mean being low impact. The content produced by the team in 2025 will represent the University publicly for years after the fact, which is part of what makes the job matter, and also part of what makes it feel heavy at times. This is not throwaway content produced for a single campaign cycle. It is material that carries the institution’s story forward long after the production wraps.
Day to day, the work looks like this: early starts, often before five in the morning, to film before campus fills with people and before the light changes over the Water of Leith. Production days regularly ran to twelve hours. Heavy camera and lighting gear had to be carried across a large, sprawling campus between locations. Long stretches in the edit suite followed, working through what can feel like the twentieth version of a change that looks small on paper but is not small in the amount of attention it demands. Uthakhamkong describes all of this without complaint, treating it as simply the reality of producing brand content at this scale.
Leadership within a small creative team is something Uthakhamkong has thought about carefully rather than treated as an afterthought to the production schedule. His stated goal is to build a working environment where people feel safe enough to try new approaches and confident enough to actually deliver on them under pressure. When the year became demanding, which it did at multiple points, what kept standards high was the people doing the work rather than any single process or system. He is direct in crediting the quality of the 2025 output to the whole team, not to himself as the person leading it.
Team turnover is part of working inside a university environment, and 2025 was no exception. People moved on to new roles, new team members joined partway through the year, and others began new chapters outside the institution altogether. Uthakhamkong holds that reality with some care rather than treating it as simply a logistics problem to manage around. What stays constant through those changes, in his view, is the foundation built together: the standard of the content, the working relationships, and the trust established between people who often had to rely on each other under real time pressure.
Heading into 2026, Uthakhamkong has set a clear focus on storytelling, on producing work that actually means something rather than simply filling a content calendar, and on continuing to build a team culture worth being part of. The reflection closes not with a list of production statistics, but with an acknowledgement of the people who made 2025’s output possible, a theme that runs through most of what Uthakhamkong has written publicly about leading creative teams throughout his career.
For anyone researching Uthakhamkong’s professional background at the University of Otago, this reflection is a useful counterpoint to the polished case studies produced by the Brand Content team over the same period. It shows the production reality behind institutional video and brand work, the early starts, long days, and repeated revisions that rarely make it into a finished graduate story or research video, and it explains why he places so much weight on team culture rather than individual output when talking about what a successful year in creative production actually looks like.
Date
December 2025
Role
Brand Content Producer and Team Leader, University of Otago
Team
Brand Content Team, University of Otago, Dunedin
Website
otago.ac.nz