The Way We Watch

The Key To Good Video: Mess With Expectations

 

Many times, but not all, the difference between what is interesting and what is boring in any media is that the good stuff plays with your expectations.

You think things will go one way and you're surprised when it goes down a different road that is so ingenious that you just have to sit up and take notice.

You can help your storytelling by creating an expectation with genre and then tweaking it or turning it on its head.

I've posted this video before that has a wonderful surprise in the middle but at the start it looks like a "This is another white text on black background" video.

Nearly ten million hits later it's easy to see why this alarmingly simple video has reached viral nirvana.

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The hardest thing we do as video producers is to create video pieces that are original.  Everything has been done with budgets far larger then what you have.

But, there is usually a way to go that will make people hold their mouse in check and not click to something else.

Recently, Wheelhouse (I am a Principal) was hired to promote a new book.

I asked the client what kind of storytelling did she like.  Not just from her company but any company.  She showed me this.

Click here if you can't see the video.

I like it too.  Why?  The story telling is simple and there's a surprise.  You don't expect the nice shot of Bermuda (or where ever it is) to be a landing pad for dripping blood.  The video plays with your expectations of a television ad for something incredibly relaxing.

With that in mind, we pitched and produced this piece for a new murder mystery.

 

Click here if you can't see the video.

How do you set expectations and then turn them upside down?

image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/moirabot/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

What Do People Remember After The Video Ends?

On a recent talking heads video, I wanted the composition of the frame and the image to tell as much of a story as what people in the video were saying.

Words make or break your story.  Images burn in a memory.

Can't see the video, click here.

A PR Person's Guide: How To Maximize Your Video Edit Time

I'm talking to PR people in this post. 

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:

1. Have all names and titles spell checked and have ready before Phase 1.
2. If you want to use your client's font, make sure you have a mac version of it to share with the Producer.
3. 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.
   
4. 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; It's something that is very subjective.  However, if an editor has chosen a cut of music they love and they start to edit with it (cutting to the beat) then you, as the client,  disagree with the music --  you have lost valuable time.
   It's always helpful (as a client) to tell an editor or a producer -- "The music should sound like this..."  
   
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5. 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. 
   
6. 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.
7. 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.
   

Image Credit: Matt Gibson

What are your experiences in making video for your clients?

Makes Me Want To Watch - Makes Me Want To Share

Awesomeness.  My impulse upon seeing this was to spread it.

The stuff that cuts through the clutter gets shared.

Would I buy the camera?  Not so sure.  Will I remember the brand?  You bet.

Do you want to share this? 

Can't see the video. Click here.

5 Lessons Learned On Producing Viral Video

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:

1. 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.
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
3. 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).
   
   
4. 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.
   
   
5. 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.

Why The "I Love You Beth Cooper" Viral Video Marketing Failed

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:

1. Should school officials been told of what was happening?  
2. Should Kenya have been paid for her efforts. 
   
3. Should she have accepted. If I was graduating that day in Kenya's class I would have felt used.  
4. Should her parents have let her do this.
   
5. 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).
   
6. 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 YouTube Annotations

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.

A short how to video about Annotations is here.

Happy annotating!

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Had To Share...

Social Media is for sharing, right?  Have a good weekend.
 

Iron Man vs Bruce Lee from Patrick Boivin on Vimeo.