Doing Words

How do you do a great product video?

// November 17th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Branding, Communication, Conversion, Social Media, Video

Lately, all my roads seem to lead not to Rome but to video; online streaming video, for education, business, advertising and starting-up web startups. The Universe is trying to tell me something. I’m spending a lot of time considering what makes a great product video — the sort of video that launches a new product on the homepage of a web business.

Such videos are hard to get right: they need to rapidly attract and hold your attention like a television commercial but that conflicts with their need to be informative, to address features as well as benefits. They need to give you a sense for the structure of the story they tell from the beginning, so you can decide whether you’ll watch the whole thing, without being so structured that the story navigation interrupts the story telling.

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If you’re a geek, be proud of being a geek

// May 12th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Branding, Communication, Fun, people, Social Media, Social Media, Video

Why add polish when in today’s society, being so geeky is so credible? I love this intro video for Diaspora. Now it needs to be mashed-up into a music video for some yet-to-break indie band. Call it “OK Go Make A Social Network”.

The thought for today: when branding, be true to who you are. Customers have a seventh sense for these things.

All you need is an idea… and lots of time

// May 10th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Video, Work

The democratisation of media technology means if you have something to say in words, you can tweet it, blog it, print it and get 1,000 copies done in perfect-bound full-colour before close-of-business tomorrow. If you ache to express yourself with images you can grab a digital still camera, video camera or mobile phone, edit it there and go straight to the web or to DVD. And if you want to create music all you need is a laptop, a midi interface or a microphone, a copy of Garageband and publish your music straight to the web.

But there are still two limits to self-expression:

• Ideas; and
• Time.

You need at  least one idea and you need lots (loads, masses, heaps) of time.

In fact, I can define a new genre of art that is defined primarily by the time taken to produce it. Vimeo is full of examples where the idea itself wasn’t so inventive but the artist has distinguished themselves and found an audience by devoting an enormous amount of time to the expression of the idea.

Here’s an example where the idea’s not a big deal (anybody who’s bounced a ball for a while has heard rhythms in the bounce) but the art is in the expression and the time taken to express it in video. It’s very well done.

It’s been said by people much smarter than me that the most precious commodity of our age is time. I’d humbly suggest that without an idea, time will achieve nothing, yet without time, an idea will remain unrealised.

Gravité from Renaud Hallée on Vimeo.

When all the world seems made of pixels

// April 14th, 2010 // 0 Comments // My work, Video

I’ve been working on a video project for a few months. First I worked on the strategy that led to brand development, which led to the scriptwriting and direction. The product will be launched in a couple of weeks and then I can show you the video.

But first, how to explain a product that doesn’t exist, in a video? You can’t show people the product.

Well, the product is used to help people collaborate on ideas. People in groups are easy to shoot, but how do you convey the development of ideas without a big special effects budget?

The solution: a visual metaphor. We came up with groups of people building ideas out of Lego-style bricks.

Then the brainstorming got a little out of hand and we agreed we’d try and build the brand-name using the bricks and feature them in the climax of the launch video.

Oh boy. For a week I struggled with designing the brand name in letters large enough to be legible in a wide shot writ small on a YouTube-sized video, while using a brand of bricks that really didn’t stick together in shapes much bigger than 30-40 blocks. Forget good typography, this was survival-of-the-fittest-letter-shape.

In the end it took a lot of silicone adhesive to keep some of the more unstable letters (like ‘R’ and ‘S’) together. We got the shot done, but for a few days afterwards I was left seeing my surroundings re-imagined as Lego bricks. ‘If I had to build that car/building/person out of bricks, how would I do it?’ was all I could think of.

Here’s some stills from the shoot:
Can we pull this off?
Pause for further direction
Cast member on monitor
Collaborating on an idea
Shooting the CEO in a lift scene
Cast holding the letters

Here’s a much more impressive video project using pixelated shapes. I wish I’d had half the special effects budget and a tenth of the creativity of this team!