MotionPost recently produced a series of promotional videos
for the American Marketing Association's BrandSmart 2012 Conference. But our
challenges threatened to overcome the available budget. Here are some of the
approaches we used to create a successful, motivating series of videos in spite
of big obstacles - they can work for you too!
1. Consider Video Conferencing
Flying out or hiring local producers to interview keynote
speakers for the promotions prior to the event was not in the budget, and
deadlines were tight. So we turned to videoconferencing, without the expense of
a fully-crewed video shoot.
2. Use Existing Footage
By using quick cuts of existing b-roll footage to supplement
the videoconference results, we added visual interest, depth and excitement, all
without costly on-location shooting.
3. Create Interesting Backdrops
We tracked the footage into a 3D-modeled desktop computer,
strategically including the Brandsmart 2012 logo. Our approach leveraged the
streaming quality of the raw footage to convey the immediacy and power of
social media. So we turned the unique challenges of the interviews into an even
stronger statement about the subject.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
The Chicago Creative Pro Users Group celebrated its tenth anniversary this last week and held a celebration at Encoenta Roma in Chicago Board and several of the founders of the Group.
Pictured Left to right top row, Brian Kaempen, Tom Foss, Fred Pfeifer, Gary Adcock, Geoff Slawson.
Middle Row; Jim Kropp, Kelly Emmerling, Sue Lawson, Jeff Evenson, George Patay, Steve Eisen and Keith Dadey.
Seated middle Billy Sheahan.
Often the unique challenges involved in
bringing together all of the elements of a video project can seem
overwhelming. With experience and the right tools, a good video
producer knows that the best solutions to the challenges of
logistics, budget and deadline can also provide the best
inspiration for the creative look and feel of a video presentation.
This has never been more true than with our promotional video work
for the Chicago American Marketing Association's (AMA) annual one-day
“Brandsmart” events.
"I'm Going to Brandsmart"
For all of the promotional videos we've
done for Brandsmart, the goal has been to create a series of short
testimonial spotlights that include a wide variety of past attendees
and influential CMO's, as well as the industry luminaries that will
be speaking at the event, explaining why Brandsmart is THE event to
attend if you are a marketer in Chicago (because, it really is).
Our target list of potential
interviewees are from all over map – industry-wise, and physically.
So, the the biggest challenge for producing the series is
coordinating all of our busy subjects into separate interviews in a
timely and economical manner, scheduled into a tight window optimized
to have strongest impact on attendee registration. For the 3 series
we've done, we solved the problem in 3 very different ways and each
solution informed very different creative approaches for the finished
product.
For Brandsmart 2010, we realized that
most of the people on our interview target-list would be coming
together for a separate AMA gathering a few weeks before the
Brandsmart event. We made arrangements to pull each one aside during
that preceding event to discuss on video about why Brandsmart was
important to them professionally. As luck would have it, the only
space available adjacent to the gathering was very small, and not
really attractive enough to offer a suitable background for our
subjects. A white psyche backdrop, a fast paced interview style,
and close, intimate photography, answered all of these challenges and
created very effective series.
"Relevance"
Here's the rest of the series, including an and amusing spoof of the concept preformed by Megan Gaus who proved to be a very knowledgeable professional, and very funny too.
More recently we produced two short
video promotional series for Brandsmart 2012. We wanted to
spotlight some top executives that had previous organizational
involvement with the event. For these we were able to coordinate a
more traditional and sophisticated one-on-one conversations with AMA
committee members using part of the Chicago skyline as our backdrop.
The second series we did for 2012
required interviews of Brandsmart key-note speakers to tease their
topics and give an impression of their unique outlook on the
industry. The AMA invites speakers from all over the country, but
flying out or hiring local production crews for each 2 minute piece
just wasn't in the budget. To save time and money in the face of a
looming deadline, we suggested that we interview the speakers via
video conference over the internet. We experimented with several
on-line services and found Skype to be the most accessible for our
needs. This approach allowed an extremely flexible interview
schedule, and was conducted without the expense of fully-crewed video
shoot.
Because of the limitations of streaming
live video over the internet, video quality was pretty compromised in
the raw interview footage compared to what we have gotten from a
traditional shoot. After getting the messaging just right, we needed to “dress it up” a bit so we tracked the footage
into a 3d-modeled desktop computer (strategically including the
Brandsmart 2012 branding as a backdrop). As a result, we had
leverage the “streaming quality” of the footage to imply the
immediacy and power of social media in today's marketing space. We
turned the unique challenges of the interviews into an even stronger
statement about it's subject.
The feature-length documentary is now available for sale
at the official Forsdon The Movie website.
Lovingly created by Ed at Motion Post for the producers at North Shore Films, a 3-disc set of Fordson is now available for sale. You get a Blu-Ray™ and DVD Video of the 92 minute
theatrical release as it appeared in AMC
Theatres in the Fall of 2011 (held over for two weeks in some cities!). The 3rd disc is a 122 minute
Special Features DVD which contains: Q&A with the cast from an
MLK Symposum held at the University of Michigan, Extended Trailer,
Theatrical Trailer, News Interviews with Director and Producers,
Fordson Principal Imad Fadlallah's Class of 2010 Commencement Address,
Repositioning Islam in America TEDx talk, FORDSON Rap Video, Comments from Hillary Clinton and Michael Moore and other extras..
If you missed it last year, and you have
Netflix streaming, you can also see it in it's entirety online. Obviously, I
can't link to the stream directly here, so if you have a Netflix
streaming account, login to it and do a search for "Fordson". (edit: or try this)
Mothlight Pictures brought Memorial Healthcare’s Joint
Replacement Team commercial to us. DP Pete Biagi shot on Fletcher Chicago’sArri Alexa. What beautiful looking footage. Directed by Marc Wellin cut in
Final Cut Pro 7 by Jeff Evenson. Sandy Weber of FlixDisc created and tracked all the red glows.
One of the more rewarding aspects of being in the marketing and communications business is when a new client calls because they saw a previous video you produced and loved it. That’s what happened last fall when the Applied Learning Program at the Illinois Institute of Technology called to say they wanted to talk to Motion Post about producing a recruiting video. During the spring of 2011 Motion Post produced a re-branding video for IIT’s Institute for Food Safety and Health, better known as IFSH.
At our first meeting we decided to shoot some scenic shoots of the campus during the beautiful fall weather. Tom McCosky visited the IIT campus on a beautiful September day. The footage looked incredible. Our client had even asked if that was the same place he worked. :)
View of IIT Campus from the tower
After the Holidays we sat down with the IIT team and started to plan the project. University recruitment programs need to hit the mark. What’s the draw for students to want to come to IIT Chicago and join the program? IIT is a world class university. Chicago is a great city. The Applied Learning Programs offers a 6 week internship that not only increases the student’s business skills but has proven to be an extremely effective program for helping each student with their English skills. That’s the big pay off. And we captured it all.
Great locations at IIT's University Technology Park
Some amazing interviews from the faculty and of the student’s experiences and how they’ll be able to apply their new working skills and their coursework to the workforce back home or wherever they choose to live and work.
Now it was time to edit the program, with ten hours of interviews in the can, we decided to use the latest version of Adobe’s industry leading software Premiere Pro CS 6 to cut this project. We love premiere’s ability to work with P2 footage right off the cards (no need to transcode), this would let us speed through all of the interviews and capture the best possible sound bites. Next we had to fine tune the interviews into a clear narrative. We used the faculty to give the program the flow then interspersed the alumni to support the faculty comments. After the first round of positive client reviews we started to polish the program. We used Magic Bullet’s Colorista 2 for color grading and Digital Anarchy’s Beauty Box to really have everyone look their best. Adobe audition completed the audio clean up and mix.
McCormick Center with Colorista 2 applied
McCormick Center without Colorista 2 applied
Interview with Beauty Box and Colorista 2 applied
Interview without Beauty Box and Colorista 2 applied
Interview with Beauty Box and Colorista 2 applied
Interview without Beauty Box and Colorista 2 applied
The final step was to author a dvd and print up the packaging. We worked with IIT’s internal communications department to create an effective/informative video brochure, packing for the finished DVD.
The Recruiting video made its way to 8 Universities in Korea a week after we finished the program in April 2012. Rave reviews by all. Next stop China. The program plans to make it to 8 countries including the U.S.
A quick blog post to give you an update of what is happening in vegas. Lots of great software and equipment to look at on this trip to Vegas. The things that impressed me the most Adobe CS 6, Smoke on a Mac and Da Vinci Resolve were my three favorites.
AutoDesk lowered the price ($3500 plus $500 per year License). This is an awesome product I'm looking forward to testing it out on their public Beta this summer.
I'm no writer, but I'm fascinated with the process of writing. It's the purest form of art in my opinion. I think the writing process has a lot in common with video editing, especially the kind of unscripted work that I do most of the time, (to be honest though, at it's best, editing can probably only be regarded as a "high craft")
Anyway...
Six Tips on Writing from John Steinbeck
1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.
Motion Post had another fantastic year in 2011. We edited a feature length documentary, Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Footballwhich had a very successful national theatrical run.
The film won several prestigious awards including a Special Jury award at the Slam Dance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. It also won Best US Documentary Film at the Traverse City Film Festival, where Academy Award-winning director Michael Moore commented, “I want everyone in the country to watch this film.”
BBBBRRRR!!!! Special Olympics Illinois asked us to go outside to produce a marketing video for their annual Polar Plunge. We interviewed the "plungers" as they got ready to run into the frozen waters. We wanted to show how easy it was to raise money for this awesome charity.
IIT's Institute for Food Safety asked us to produce a Satellite Media Tour for their re-branded Institute for Food Safety. Motion Post put together a turn key production to show off all the work IFSH does to protect consumers.
HOOPS! Veteran ESPN producer Erik Rosenthals came to Motion Post to create a “X’a & O’s” interstitial series for ACC college basketball on ESPNU. Coach K and Coach Roy Williams were some of the luminaries who mapped out their best “buzzer beater” strategies for college hoops fans.
The Once of Prevention and director Chris Guillen partnered with Motion Post to create a powerful fundraising video for Educare, The Once’s national network of early childhood learning centers. We put together a veteran crew that traveled to 5 cities in 10 days to show the fabulous work that this charity has been doing. We got a lot of great footage on this trip and the footage has been helping their communications department leverage it well beyond the scope of the main program.
2011 saw dramatic changes at Sara Lee, Inc. as they conducted a broad divestiture and restructuring to emerge as a stronger and company in 2012. The Bricolage Group hired us to showcase all these changes. We post-produced an ongoing series of videos for their re-branded Meat and Coffee divisions to help keep their workforce informed and motivated.
We completed several local commercials for Abt electronics, Pekin Hospital, Illinois Valley Community hospital and web-ads for Cobra electronics.
We traveled to Thailand and San Diego to produce sales meeting wrap-up video for Molex.
These are just some of the highlights, we helped even more clients tell their stories. We look forward to telling your story this year.
