May 15th is aday.org's day to capture daily life around the world for this October's edition of "A Day in the World". I'll be participating and you can too.
If you want to learn how to make video compositions in Adobe After Effects and haven't been to Video Copilot's Tutorials page yet, go there now and have a look at some very useful training. If you're just starting out, try the basic training series. If you're trying to create a specific effect, look at the other tutorials for inspiration and instruction.
Mac OS X loads an agent called imagent that supports iChat, Facetime, Mail and other apps that access your contacts and either interact with IM services or show buddy status from IM services. For audio and video production uses this is more than an annoyance. You really don't want iChat or Facetime magically coming to life in the middle of a recording take or while you are concentrating on complex edits or effects compositions. In Facetime you can go into preferences and turn Facetime off.
I was reading Michael Clark's "Storytelling" blog entry over at Nikon World and was reminded of the National Geographic editors' rule that "you haven't covered something if you haven't explored it from 360 degrees" as Michael puts it. This gave me the idea to do a photo project to practice those skills. If you'd like to play along and develop your own skills, pick any subject and explore it from front, back, left, right, top and bottom and all the angles in between.
I wrote about the Nikon AW100 around the beginning of the year but have just now had the chance to really use it underwater so here is an update.
We just returned from a peaceful vacation in the Caribbean. We stayed in Providenciales, Turks and Caicos, close to Grace Bay Beach. How close? It was about 3/10's of a mile walk from our front door to the water. Much less expensive than staying on the beach with no excuse for not getting in the ocean every day.
Continuing on theme of key moments and using change to draw the viewer in, have a look at this T-Mobile UK ad:
Note the use of the Dire Straits "I want my MTV" and how things change at the points where Mark Knopfler's guitar kicks in at around 1:34. Then see the changes in the characters. Did you feel the tension building? Did you know a major change was coming with that music change? A well done ad in my opinion.
Today I attended a National Geographic Traveler seminar on Travel Photography presented by Aaron Huey and Catherine Karnow. I knew I was in the right place when they stated up front it was about storytelling and proceeded to emphasize things like emotion, energy, motion, action, characters and moments. This was not an event to learn how to operate a camera or make better technical images. It was about passion, it was about people and other characters that provide a sense of place. It was about telling a story with images.
Last time I wrote about success storytelling. I made a 12 minute video explaining my thoughts on success story videos. If you've made hundreds of success story videos I think you'll find much of this to be basic but you may find the focus on key moments useful. If you've never made a success story video you will want to watch the whole thing and then go look at some good success stories on various company websites or YouTube channels.
The most successful success stories follow a simple formula. Most experienced producers of success stories have a standard set of questions they aim to answer in the video. They usually look something like this:
• How was it before?
• What made you decide to change?
• Who helped you?
• What did you do?
• What was the result?
Telling a story is not easy. Telling a good story is powerful. And a story well told makes for very effective marketing.
I'm adding video marketing to the range of services I offer. Best practices for video marketing focus on storytelling for good reason. It isn't about the best technical equipment, the right settings or even the lighting. Those can support, but not make, a great storytelling.
