You're busy. You always have more than one client or one job that is taking up your day. You want a video so you're calling on a trusted video producer. And, your budgets are always tight.
With the explosion of web video, I've been getting calls from PR folk, asking me to edit together a 2-3 minute video story for a website about an event, an opening, a party, a gala. You get the drill. As much as PR people want to make the video, cost is their over riding concern. Many times footage comes from another source and I have no control on what it is or how it's shot. (That's the topic for another soon to written post).
I thought I would share some tips to make your dollar go as far as it can when working with video professionals.
Before the job, negotiate the schedule and billing. For smaller budget shows, the post process happens in four phases.
Phase 1: Loading footage, creating show titles, lower third supers (id's), choosing music, slugging together the sound bites and selecting the best b-roll shots.
Phase 2: Editing the show flow, whittling down sound bites, cutting to music, laying in titles.
Phase 3: Review with Client
Phase 4: Tweaks, audio mix, color correct, Upload final, create master and web files.
In order for this to run smoothly you, the PR person, should do the following:
Have all names and titles spell checked and have ready before Phase 1.
If you want to use your client's font, make sure you have a mac version of it to share with the Producer.
Determine any show open titles, show ending titles, urls that have to be flashed, logos, or bugs that have to be shown. Again, make sure the Producer has them before Phase 1.
Determine the genre of music that you want. Give examples to the producer of stuff that you've heard that you like. Music is the easiest thing in a video not to like. But if you only have 20 hours of editing, killing the music cut - after 15 hours of editing has elapsed - can kill a project's budget.
Make sure you have your client's time booked to see the rough cut and finished versions. You don't want your video post crew waiting around and billing you.
Where are you uploading this? Let the producer know whether this is being streamed on a client's server, YouTube or other social media platform for distribution.
Content. The more you can share about what your client wants to see in the finished version - the easier it will be to hit the ground running on that first few hours of editing. At the very least, tell the Producer the two essential pieces of information that have to be communicated and what emotion you want viewers to feel after they have watched it.
Last month I produced and directed (via Wheelhouse Communications) the book trailer to Libba Bray's Going Bovine for Random House Children's Books. This video lit up Twitter when it debuted on EW.com and continues to build a growing audience through Young Adult blogs and other sites. I wanted to tee up the valuable lessons learned in this experience for you to bear in mind on the next video you make:
Be Different.A standard Q & A author video with cuts to the cover art is not going to stand out or be remarkable. In this video, we started with a wacky premise: the author wore a cow suit and did not mention it at all.
Spend Time On The Edit.Most beginning web video makers want to concentrate all on the shoot. Here's my advice: spend more time on the edit. If you're hiring professionals make sure you've budgeted ample time for the creatives to digest all the footage, try out sequences, and then some more time to add some zing and polish.
It Takes A Village To Go Viral. With the video done, it was time to get people to notice it. Everyone involved in your video should have a strong or fledgling social web prescence to shout out to the world, "Hey, watch this video!" In the case of Going Bovine - Random House has an incredible in-house publicity department that worked all the blogging and twitter angles to their advantage.
Libba Bray, the author, has a well trafficked blog and sizable twitter following @libbabray. Her twitter following includes fans, other authors, librarians and bloggers. Bray blogged about the making of the video (see here) and then tweeted out the link when it was first available. Lastly, yours truly, the filmmaker pointed all my contacts to see the video by posting on twitter, facebook and linkedin. Through some social networking, I was able able to get it posted on the popular eguiders.com site. (see here).
There Is A Place For Traditional PR. A month before the book's publication, the video premiered on the highly trafficked EntertainmentWeelkly.com's site (EW.com = nearly 4 million visitors/month) Shelf Life. Random House did a great job getting this eyeball friendly placement and it was the initial engine that drove views. I think it was a good strategy. It forced the truest and most loyal fans to go to the EW site and read the positive review of the book and the video - See here.
Video Feeds The Conversation. The second life of the video started a week after the EW.com blog premiere. RH posted the video to YouTube. Fans of Young Adult (YA) literature are all over the web. It's an extremely vocal and supportive group that includes readers, librarians, teachers, publishers, authors and agents. Again, it was traditional PR relationship building at work that informed this audience about the book's release and the video.
When thinking about spending the resources and time on a video think about if there is an existing online community that is already in place. For this video, it was interesting to see how many blogs embedded the youtube clip or linked to it. See here, here, and here for examples. I would show you the plethora of tweets that the video received but time has erased them from twitter's memory. Believe me - the link chirping was plentiful.
Summary Be clever with your video - first and foremost. No one is going to link to plain Jane video anymore. Use your budget for editing; it's the most essential part of your process. Create videos for audiences that have strong social platforms in place. Lastly, everyone involved in the making of your video should have a strong social web presence.
The Wall Street Journal reported today the story of Kenya Mejia, a real life valedictorian from Los Angeles who was paid by the marketers of the movie, I Love You Beth Cooper to pronounce her love for fellow classmate Jake Minor at the end of her speech.
Marketing executives for Twentieth Century Fox produced this stunt as part of a campaign to generate YouTube buzz before the opening weekend of the film.
The WSJ article does a great job of explaining how FOX, through a unit of Creative Arts Agency (CAA) found Kenya, got buy in from her and her parents and then filmed the speech with help from another company. Apparently school officials and the student body were unaware that they were players in the marketing effort.
There are a lot of ethical issues here:
Should school officials been told of what was happening?
Should Kenya have been paid for her efforts.
Should she have accepted. If I was graduating that day in Kenya's class I would have felt used.
Should her parents have let her do this.
Should personal release statements been signed for all the graduates that can be seen and heard in the video (they may have done this, but I doubt it).
Should we always be transparent in our marketing?
My thoughts (as a producer of video) lead to why didn't the video do better? As of this writing the video has only claimed about 2000 hits. Considering the effort and resources that FOX, CAA and the production company put in, why aren't they getting their eyeball's worth.
Here is the video:
My reasons as to why this didn't go viral:
The video starts too neatly, "To summarize it all..." I would have chosen to start earlier or later in the middle of a sentence ... (in media res) that's how the Greeks did it.
"I was recently watching the trailer for the upcoming movie...." This sounds fake. How's this: "I'm borrowing this idea from the new movie "I Love You Beth Cooper." (perhaps also making a joke about citing sources). Small point but it may have helped. By the way, Kenya's performance was spot on. They picked the right person.
There are five cuts in the video. This sets off my radar immediately. No one edits their graduation footage. It's a tip off that this is manufactured. I would have done it all in one take. Harder to pull off, for sure, but that's what it requires.
Maybe anyone who quotes a movie trailer in her valedictorian speech isn't worth watching?
What do you think? Forgetting the ethical marketing issues aside, how come this didn't work?
Post script: 24 hours after the WSJ article with tweets and blogs as the engine the video now has 10,000 hits. Was this the aim all along?
Using Annotations in YouTube an easy way to highlight important points in your video.
It's great for underlining takeaways and to do's. Or, have fun with them and undercut what is being said on screen like when Woody Allen used subtitles in Annie Hall.
You create the annotations after you have uploaded your video to YouTube. There's a really simple editor that you can use to make thought bubbles, text in boxes, or links to share other URLs in YouTube.
Check out this simple one that I made. Title: A Blogger At Work:
Music: Kevin Macleod
Another example that I wrote about a few weeks ago is here.
Quick quiz. Close your eyes and tell me what you think of when you hear the words YouTube. Here’s my free association: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Sometimes really ugly.
But, let’s say I wanted to know how the George Washington Bridge looks from a car window. Sure enough – in jerky DV - there it is: ah, the magic of relevant search.However, to browse YouTube clip by clip for excellent content would be kind of ridiculous.
Vimeo is an all-together different animal. It is the go to destination for filmmakers and wannabe filmmakers searching for inspiration. Owned by IAC (Barry Diller's conglomerate), the community is known for being supportive and celebrating the artist. It's led by a team of Community Directors (that’s their real title) like Blake Whitman.
Strategically, Vimeo does not allow any video that actively promotes a product or service – except for self-promotion of members themselves. And, that's why it works so well. Freed from the constraints of selling a product, filmmakers are liberated to explore anything that makes them excited. To simply do a great job and do it for the feedback is enough.
Whitman was hired from the community itself. Still a filmmaker at heart, Whitman's mission along with his other community directors is to show, “that Vimeo is about creative video. We’re looking to inspire members to take that next step… to go from a pro-sumer to a professional.”
(Note: Michael Bay need not apply).
Vimeo was the pioneer in allowing members to upload HD files (October 2007) so it quickly became a home for serious filmmakers. Vimeo has never looked back.
The Vimeo difference plays itself out when filmmakers post a video. Usually a video post includes the credits of who made the film, what camera it was shot on and any other inside information that is relevant like lenses or processing effects. Community members will give support, ask technical questions, and give honest and open opinions of the work being shown.
In my post of 37 Viral Video Web Tips, I noted that the Vimeo staff picks are the videos to watch. Here’s what Whitman looks for in one of his staff picks: “If I can inspire someone through the staff picks that’s probably the best thing. The qualities I look for are something that is inspiring, something that is interesting something that is in the possibility of someone doing it themselves." (Paging Mr. Bay. You won't be a staff pick any time soon).
Here are three of Blake’s picks that speak directly to what he’s looking for:
Stop Frame As Metaphor One staff pick video that would probably take a long time for Blake to do himself is The Long Haul. A wickedly good stop frame animation and labor of love that Sylvain Dumais and his producing partners Full Serve Productions in Toronto put together. Sylvain worked on the project during a long haul of two months and split the cost with the producers. All the staff worked for free – but all are using the piece as a demo reel to show their services.
Knowing that Vimeo is a destination for not just supportive filmmakers but bloggers and agency types, Dumais didn’t think of premiering his piece anywhere but Vimeo.
With the help of Whitman's golden pick, the video went viral. 72,000 views in 11 days. The video got picked up by Andrew Sullivan's website and then featured on other well-known blogs. Sylvain has been on the phone with talent scouts, camera accessory manufacturers for sponsorships and Good Morning America.
Sylvain cherishes the nurturing environment that Vimeo has created: “Well, the Vimeo community has really great and generous feedback. It's a hub for a lot of creative people both professional and amateur and is somehow more serious then let's say, YouTube. So when people see something they like they often comment, mostly positively and constructively as they create video as well and know about the medium. Vimeo is always evolving where as YouTube looks the same since forever. I'll say the most important and great thing about it is the content and the users.”
Of course the web is one great pool to steal from and Dumais knows with popularity comes the double edged sword of someone lifting your ideas.
Dumais:You know what I really think? I think that an ad agency will decide to do something really similar for whatever brand they work with as it often happen. If I'm lucky enough, they'll ask me to do it (or re-do it)! If not, I'll be able to say that that big production is inspired directly from my work. Either ways I'm winning out of it as it will get me attention.
I hope there is at least one smart bold agency out there that will ask Dumais to do make something completely new and different.
In the meantime, make something beautiful and upload it on Vimeo or just subscribe to the RSS of their staff picks here.
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