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.

Behind the Scenes at SVG: Editing

“You make three films. There’s the film you write, the film you shoot, and the film you edit.”

-Ancient Filmmaking Proverb

Shooting a video or film is unglamorous. It is an inherently structered, regimented, slow, and tedious process. On set you aren’t creating, just following the instructions laid out in the script: a shot from this angle, a line from that actor. The real creative inspiration comes from the writers, while questions of structure, pace, and taste go to the editors.

Imagine: the writer finds the diamond, the director digs it up, and the editor cuts to find the natural beauty. It’s much the same for social video marketing as it is for film.

We shot our own video commercial a few weeks back. You can read about the shoot here. On set we worked to cover the angles and actions laid out in the script. Apart from lighting, however, there was very little creative energy. Putting the pieces of the puzzle we shot together in the editing room, however, proved to be great creative fun.

The first thing I noticed, after the painful transcoding and backing up process, is how many things we shot that didn’t work. Sometimes it’s continuity, sound, framing, performance, etc. Most of the time it’s pacing, especially in a marketing video. You only have a couple minutes to hook your viewer and tell a story; beyond that you bore them, especially in the age of countless kitten video distractions. I started with a three minute cut and struggled to trim it to a taught two minutes two seconds at a time. the cuts always seemed to be my favorite shots. They just didn’t fit when I reduced the piece to it’s essential parts.

Perhaps I’ll come up with a 3 minute “Directors Cut Special Edition.” Then again, the edited film is better than the ones I wrote and shot. The boundary of running time helped.

This is why SVG shoots so much footage for our clients. We want to bring many pieces to the editing room so we can use only the best and most essential ones in our final cut. We spent two days shooting at the Al Huda Society and boiled the footage down to two minutes. Don’t be surprised when something we shoot for your company doesn’t make the cut.

With Non-Linear Editing technology powerful enough to do almost anything, the artistic choices an editor has are nearly limitless. (If you want to see that power used poorly check out this behind the scenes video of the first Star Wars prequel.) Then there is sound editing, mixing, and visual effects. You can do anything you want nowadays, but it’s often best to stay within boundaries.

That’s why production companies like SVG exist: To collaborate with clients on branding and content, go through the process of shooting, and craft everything into a cohesive, snappy social video.  That’s in addition to technical editing expertise with encoding for the web, uploading with a CMS, printing DVD’s, and so on. We have the experience and expertise to quickly turnaround a final cut.

I’ve hardly scratched the surface here, but I thought I’d share some of our experience editing at SVG.

UPDATE: Watch our new Videomercial on Youtube.

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.

Ogilvy Launches Advanced Video Practice

Ogilvy & Mather, a well-known international marketing firm founded in 1948, that has worked with big-name clients like IBM, Greenpeace, Ford, and DuPont, has “formally launched a specialty video practice, a unit that has been in development for two years.”  The press release went out July, 21, 2011.

At Skillman Video Group (SVG), we know the value of video marketing for businesses who want to make their individual voices heard online, effectively and efficiently.

Even Ogilvy & Mather North America CEO John Seifert thinks the results of video marketing are “impressive…we are now making it a distinct practice area to reflect the changes and opportunities in our business.”

Video marketing has been so successful for the largest marketing firm in the world, Ogilvy, that they have created a practice group around it. SVG has been touting the benefits of video marketing for companies since it started.

The digital and social impact of video marketing for small business and large companies, alike, is enormous and becoming more noticeable. Maximizing the potential for the Three Cs, corporate video production in Boston, SVG combines Internet marketing and search engine optimization with compelling video content that reaches the intended viewers.

Read the full press release here: http://www.ogilvy.com/News/Press-Releases/July-2011-Ogilvy-Launches-Advanced-Video-Practice-to-Meet–Expanding-Needs-of-Clients.aspx

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.

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.

A Comparison of Video Search Engines

As a continuation of my previous blog post on video search engines, I thought it would be fascinating to test out a couple video search sites to see how their results differ. As I wrote in the aforementioned post, video search engines can be classified as either independent or proprietary, depending on whether or not they are biased toward their own hosted content. Here, I set out to find just how different the results are between various video search engines by making a comparison between Google Video Search, Blinkx, and Truveo.

In order to obtain meaningful results, I wanted to test a keyword that was related to business marketing, as well as geographically specific. I decided on Boston house painters. A Google video search for this term produces 679 results. Around half of the first-page results are from YouTube, while the other half are from a variety of different sources. Relevance to the search term seems to drop sharply after the sixth page of results. Searching for Boston house painters on Blinkx (an independent video search engine) produces many more results: around 29,000. However, only the first three pages of results seem particularly relevant to the search terms. Another independent video search site, Truveo, produces disappointing results. Truveo does not tell users the number of matches for a particular query, but I did notice the majority of the results after the first five were not relevant to Boston house painters.

In terms of ease of navigation and usability, Google wins hands-down. By having the cleanest interface, as well as a plethora of options to sort and filter search results, Google video search is the most pleasant to use of the three I tested. The Google results can be sorted by video length, date uploaded, relevance, video quality, or source. Meanwhile, Blinkx’s interface is a bit cluttered, and I did not appreciate the fact that the top result begins playing automatically, causing longer load times. Truveo looks clean and well organized, but there are few options for sorting or filtering results.

In summary, the three search engines found very similar results, but placed them in a different order. There was no significant difference between the number of videos from a particular source (i.e. Google did not list a disproportionate number of videos from YouTube). This experiment demonstrates the complexities of video search. With each search engine being differentiated, it is growing increasingly complicated to place your site to the top of the results for each of these sites. Although Google is currently the undisputed “king of search,” it could be dethroned at any time by a start-up with a few innovative ideas! Your business needs to be prepared for this possibility. Let Skillman Video Group take care of your video optimization needs, and keep your business ahead of the curve!

A Word About Video Search Engines

Searching for a video on a specific topic? Look no further than a video search engine, a specialized search engine that crawls the web for video content. In addition to searching by keyword, many of these sites allow users to search by video file type, or by the length of the clip. Search results are typically displayed as a thumbnail and a short description. Some video search engines simply search externally hosted content, while others allow content to be uploaded and hosted on their own servers (such as YouTube).

Video search engines began appearing in 2004, and the technology has since evolved quickly. Some video searches are performed using human-powered search (meaning that the results are based off tags that people have applied to videos), while others use complex algorithms that work automatically to detect what a specific video is about. Translating speech from a video into searchable text is possible, but the technology is not yet completely refined, especially when there is ambient noise or multiple people speaking at the same time.

Video search engines can be classified as either independent or proprietary. Basically, an independent search engine is one that gives equal weight to all results, regardless of where the videos are hosted. Most of these search engines do not host their own content. Some of the more popular independent video search engines include Blinkx, CastTV, Truveo, and ZaPom. Meanwhile, other video search engines are proprietary. This means that the results are modified due to hosted content receiving preferential treatment. For instance, videos hosted on YouTube tend to be highly ranked in Google video search because YouTube is owned by Google. Some of the other major proprietary video search engines include AOL Video and Yahoo! Video.

So, what does all this mean for your business? In the increasingly complex world of video marketing, it is essential to stay a step ahead of your competition by making sure your videos show up in a preeminent position when your keywords are entered into the search box. Skillman Video Group’s team of optimization experts can help you each step of the way in ensuring that your customers can find you quickly and easily! Contact us today to get started optimizing your video!

Different Uses for Product Videos in your Social Media & Video Marketing Campaigns

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