FutureM and SVG: Video at the Speed of Twitter

What is FutureM?

A looking glass into the future of marketing.

Who’s at Future M?

Skilllman Video Group.

Shopximity invited SVG to tape their presentation at Future M, a marketing conference held in Boston focusing on the impact of technology on marketing. They asked us to shoot, edit, and upload a video of their presentation in 24 hours. They wanted to get the video up while the conference was still going on. It’s like a well-produced video tweet from Shopximity. For us it felt like a 24 hour race made possible by technology and our experience in fast production.

The SVG produced video should be up today. The idea of video at the speed of twitter is especially interesting to us. Instant video production might be perfect for clients who want to post while traveling or at events or any situation where time is crucial. With the world becoming more instantaneous, more 24/7, getting the word out about your company or event with near-instant professional video from anywhere will be expected. And it has to look better than the usual talk-into-the-webcam stuff you see on YouTube.

We’re going to stay ahead of this trend and keep providing fast, high-quality content.

This conference was the perfect event for us to tape. SVG believes strongly in pushing the boundaries of marketing. That’s why we embrace an integrated approach to video, social media, SEO, web design, and so on. Shopximity presented ideas about mobile technology as the new frontier of marketing. They have plans for integrating video content and interactive shopping on mobile devices. We’ll have to keep an eye on where this interactive mobile video marketing goes too.

Stay tuned to SVG’s blog for more insights into the future of video marketing.

UPDATE: Watch the video on our channel.

Make ‘Em Laugh: Social Video Marketing Services

This summer on our blog I have written about social videos that use entertainment alongside information to market a company or organization. You can read about two of my favorites: Inspiration Studios and YouTube Show and Tell. I wanted to show how to use entertaining marketing videos to attract potential customers, B2B clients, job candidates, donors, and so on.

To demonstrate how this approach might work for your company Skillman Video Group made a 2-minute social video. The idea was to create something cinematic and entertaining while advertising our social media and marketing services to a target audience, namely organizations and companies that lack modern interactive marketing campaigns. The project was out of the scope of our usual documentary style marketing videos which usually employ a single camera angle, b-roll, graphics, and interviews. Our new Videomercial utilizes actors, set design, location shooting, wardrobe, cinematography, and multiple camera angles to tell a story. It takes careful consideration of our brand and tone and balances everything with available resources.

Check the video out. What do you think?

This is a new type of service Skillman Video Group wants to offer to certain clients who would benefit from a more lighthearted, mass-appeal approach. We’d love to collaborate with clients to produce more videos of this style.

This kind of entertaining video casts a wide net and attracts a large audience. That audience then visits the company’s website for more in-depth content and marketing videos geared at turning visitors into clients. Your social media campaign (blog, twitter, email, facebook, youtube, etc.) would spread the video to both your current and potential clients. See how all the pieces fit together? That’s why SVG offers those complete, interlocking marketing services.

Imagine you are a law firm looking for the young, ambitious, future associates. You could really distinguish your firm from all the others with a short, entertaining, well-shot videomercial. Your competitors would look dull by comparison and you would see immediate ROI with more job applications. One of our clients already does something like this with SVG. The same method should work for finding B2B partners, customers, and donors, if you are looking for a younger, more casual demographic.

If you are looking to impress people with a cinematic marketing videomercial, give SVG a call.

If you want to read more about the production of this video check out our behind-the-scenes blog and pictures.

Lecture Video Series from SVG

With our ever-shorter attention spans, why would anyone make a 45-minute web video? “Shorter is better” has become a cliché in online video marketing. But SVG and Hebrew at the Center think long videos can work in education settings, which is why we keep working together on lecture videos.

So does TED.

TED started as a exclusive lecture conference selling tickets for £3000-£4000, a price tag so exclusionary as contradict their mission of spreading good ideas. When they posted their lectures online 2006 they gained 500 million viewers in just two years. Millions want the in-depth content that a longer video contains.

That’s the kind of audience you could reach if you take your lectures out of the classroom and onto the web. Not only could you deliver educational content to a limitless audience, but the exposure would be a valuable tool for fundraising efforts.

That is why Hebrew at the Center keeps coming to Skillman Video Group. We shoot lectures for the organization that they use in classroom and online settings as part of their educational efforts. The 40-minute videos deliver lessons on Hebrew that can be distributed on the web or with DVD to supplement other educational materials. The videos also work as fundraising tools by increasing awareness and demonstrating HATC’s commitment to and expertise in Hebrew education.

HATC is now talking to SVG about shooting some shorter marketing videos showing students of their program. Follow our RSS feed to hear more about our work with education and fundraising campaigns. Check out our portfolio for examples of how your organization can use long form education videos.

Behind the Scenes at SVG: On Set

Skillman Video Group spends so much time helping our clients market their companies that we rarely get the opportunity to market ourselves. When I began my work at SVG, I decided to make a cinematic commercial for our social media services, something more broad than our usual work.

It takes a lot of work to make a commercial. Scheduling, finding locations, casting, budgeting, lighting, food, etc. As if that were not enough, I set our video in a “turn-of-the-century” shoppe, which requires extra work with wardrobe, set decoration, and props. But I felt the greater production value was worth the extra investment in time.

After searching for several weeks for an appropriate, available location to serve as an Old Timey Shoppe we decided to build a set in my basement. The plan had the advantage of giving us freedom to do whatever we wanted, short of setting the building on fire, on our own schedule. It had the disadvantage of requiring that we build and decorate a set from scratch. My background in set design made it easy, despite the extra work involved.

I knew that the most important part of making a high quality video production was the cinematography. We shot the video on the Cannon 7D, a camera I’ve talked about in a previous blog post, that captures a “film-like” look. We also had quite a few more lights than we usually use in our small shoots, another element vital to achieving a cinematic look. Our cinematographer used not only his lights and camera, but also drew on his experience as a photographer, gaffer, and grip in Hollywood films.

The set, performances, costumes, and cinematography combined to make a short that showed off what SVG can do with a social video if we “pull out all the stops.”

I cashed in all favors owed to me and had great help from friends and local businesses. Many of the props came from Freight House Antiques and Mad Props. Our costume designer, cinematographer, and actor were good friends from the film business. Our supporting cast were the people of SVG. I even tapped the assistance of my local wine and cheese shop, Formaggio Kitchen, for our exteriors. It’s cool what you can get when you just ask.

If you’d like to know more about how we made our social video just leave a comment. Also check out the Behind the Scenes photos on our Facebook page.

Next up: editing. Stay tuned.

How can shooting on a DSLR boost your marketing video?

Last month on our blog I talked about why Skillman Video Group embraces trends and developments in camera technology. A major trend in videography in the past two years has been the adoption of DSLR’s. Cannon, and others, have produced still cameras capable of capturing 1080P hi-def video. The quality of the video is so great that many videographers, marketers, students, and filmmakers started using them for all manner of projects that the manufacturers hadn’t anticipated. SVG has caught the bug and and we used a Cannon 7D the Hebrew at the Center  video. What a difference it made! Our client received a high quality, cinematic-looking  video.

There are many excellent examples of the high quality image of the 7D here, here, here, and here. The difference in quality compared to a camcorder might not be immediately noticeable, but here are a few comparisons of DSLR vs. HD camcorders. Hebrew at the Center loved SVG’s DSLR footage, which made their video surpass their previous camcorder shoots.

What makes the DSLR image so great, so much more cinematic? Shallow depth of field. Motion picture film and still photographs often have a very shallow depth of field, which means that only certain objects are in focus while the background and even foreground objects are blurred. It focuses the viewer’s attention to the important parts of a shot and closely resembles how our eyes perceive the world. Camcorders, on the other hand, just look unnaturally sharp. This is one reason why your home videos never look as good as your grandparents 8mm home movies. Some also laud the colors, contrast, full frame image of DSLR’s, but the depth of field is the most noticeable difference.

DSLR’s still have a long way to go: they lack stereo audio capture, lack power zoom, lack zebra patterns, poor low-light performance, require expensive cumbersome rigs, inefficient or difficult to use codecs, etc. The lenses, essential to the depth of field, and rigs often cost more than the camera itself, but as more videographers have used them, manufacturers and third parties have found solutions.

If you want a cinematic looking marketing video a DSLR, like our 7D, is definitely your best option. A DSLR will make your social video look more professional and stand out.

Print It!

In the days of film — real celluloid with images stored as silver shadows — it was too expensive to print every take from the camera negative. When the director saw a take he liked he would shout “Print it!” and the script supervisor would circle the take in her notes. The printers would then only print the circled take saving huge money for the production.

Now that celluloid film is largely a thing of the past and video is so cheap, filmmakers can make economical use of nearly every take. Normally a whole take would be rejected if just one thing goes wrong, but now filmmakers keep shots if only one thing goes right.

In these days it’s not about what you “print,” but how you “print it.” Do you host it locally or on you tube (or vimeo)? Can viewers comment and share? Do you distribute DVD’s to your clients? Does it need to be High Def? If so, which file format? Do you need a teaser? Do you want to build a website around your video?

This is where a company like Skillman Video can really help you. We can build your website, kickstart your social media campaign, and use SEO to boost your video’s exposure. We integrate video, social media, web design, and SEO to gain our clients the highest return possible on their investment.

Cut!

I remember my college days sitting for forty hours at a Steenbeck cutting and splicing a five minute short, getting to know every frame intimately. Today the same short would probably take a quarter of the time to edit, but I think I would know the project half as well. There’s something about the tactile act of physically cutting film by hand and splicing it with tape that makes one appreciate their own work as well as the work of master editors and directors.

Nowadays it is so easy to edit video digitally on their home computer, that nearly everyone can do it. An entire generation of filmmakers has never actually “cut” film.

But don’t think good editing is not still an art. Editing is where the story comes together and takes a certain level of experience and expertise to take the most jumbled of raw footage, and turn it into a concise and powerful video. Professional editors not only use the best practices and technology, but they also use years of experience solving problems, shaping story, and most importantly, following the technological changes. They also know how to create graphics and polish audio — integral to creating professional looking and sounding video. They know how to compress video for the web just enough to make it load quickly without losing quality. It might take“do-it-yourself” home editor hours to read printed manuals and scan online help forums; only to end up no better than when they started. When you have a deadline, time can’t be wasted finding answers. That’s why the editors at Skillman Video Group keep up-to-date and well practiced in the latest editing techniques and usually can end up editing the project in a fraction of the time as a novice, and with far superior results!

Save iMovie for your home videos.

Action!

When a director says “Action” that exactly what he wants to see: Characters with an objective doing things to each other to achieve their objective. Actors think in these terms. What am I trying to do in this scene? What is my obstacle? Who am I working with or against? Why?

It works the same way in marketing. What are you trying sell? To Whom? Why?  We help answer these questions by developing your content and writing marketing copy – essentially scripting your lines. We also prepare you so that when the camera roles you sound and look confident and natural.

I talked about preparation on our blog. We had one interviewee struggling to get through her prepared lines. We suggested that she imagine that she was meeting Christina Skillman, our director, at a networking event, and that the client had to convince her to join the company in under a minute. It was a familiar scenario for the interviewee. When she thought in those objective-based terms her delivery was so natural and convincing Christina was ready to submit her resume.

That’s the kind of performance tweak we can suggest to take your video to the next level. Skillman Video Group can also develop content, allowing you to focus on your day-to-day work.

Camera!

How much do you know about: HD, DV, 4-4-4, 7D, 4K, 3300º, 3-2 pulldown, DVX 100, DigiBeta,1080i, 1080p, DSLR, f5.6, hyperfocal distance, 640×480, SECAM and NTSC? It’s not a quiz so you won’t be graded. Luckily professional cameramen do know these things and more.

Cameramen and cinematographers live for technology. I have had lunch with camera departments on film sets and been completely lost in shop talk. I sometimes think camera technology is all they talk about. But that’s exactly what camera operators and cinemetographers have to do: discuss and test new equipment every day. There are at least a dozen magazines for cinematographers and videographers and limitless forums and websites.

Digital video technology changes so often that it’s nearly impossible to keep up, unless it’s your full time job. That’s why production houses like Skillman Video Group exist: so you don’t have to purchase and learn new technology every week. Video experts can choose the most appropriate camera equipment to use for your shoot. Do you want a cinematic look or a TV look? Will you be distributing solely on the web or do you need DVD’s? Skillman Video’s cameramen know their craft and how best to apply their knowledge to your video.

Lights!

This week I thought I would share a little insight about video production that I gained from working for Hollywood and Madison Avenue for a number of years. Lights! Camera! Action!

The difference between the cinema and YouTube is lighting. Okay, there are other differences like wardrobe and make-up and set decoration, but good lighting is the most noticeable. Film cinematographers will spend hours lighting a scene. Watch the night scenes in almost any film and notice how the trees and buildings are all brilliantly lit against the night sky. Every interior light is on. Also notice how shiny the ground is. That’s because the crew wets it down with firehouses, even when there is no rain in the scene. Why? It just looks prettier reflecting the lights.

Most social videos on youtube are lit by the glow of a laptop screen. That’s good enough for amateur purposes. What if your company needs to look professional? You’ll need more lights than just a desk lamp, but not so many that you need to hire a 500KW generator and a crew of 20.

Documentary crews get by with a few small lights and bounce cards. But they still make their work look better than what you see on the web. That’s the kind of lighting we do at Skillman Video Group: simple, elegant, and fast. A simple three or four point lighting scheme not only makes your marketing video look professional, but you have to know how to get it just right. That can only come with practice. Check out some of our behind the scenes pictures on flickr to see our lighting setups in operation.

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