But what if all your shooting is B-Roll? You’re probably thinking, “no lights, no audio, no problem”, right? Well, it might not be as involved as say, and interview, but that doesn’t mean it requires any less planning. Here are 5 things to consider:

• Crew – Who is going to be shooting? Will you be alone or have a second shooter? If you do have another shooter, discuss who will shoot what, and split up! Because like the man said, “you can do more damage that way.” A second shooter to carry the load is always an added bonus. Just make sure you stay out of each other’s shots.
• Gear – What are you going to use to shoot? Which lenses will we need? How am I going to power everything? Your initial thought might be to load up a tank full of everything you have so you can be ready for anything. This is foolish. The key here is to keep things light and compact. You don’t want to bring anything you’ll regret having to carry should you need to be on your feet all day.
• Subject – What are you going to shoot? You should probably know this going in. B-Roll is designed to compliment your story. What you shoot should have a direct correlation to the narrative. If you’re producing a piece on people who dress up like comic book characters and go to anime conventions, then strap on your utility belt and cape and find the most interesting costumes in the room and hit record!
• Location – Where are you going to shoot? Having an understanding of the environment which you will be in will also help you determine what gear you’re going to need. Maybe you’ll need neutral density filters if you’re going to be outside. Perhaps you’ll need a fast lens if you know you’re going to be shooting in low light. Some places may also be sensitive to cameras and equipment. Arranging an escort is helpful so you don’t accidentally wander into a restricted area, never to be seen or heard from again…
• Food – You think I’m kidding? You’re going to need something to eat to keep you on your feet. And no matter what camera you’re using, it’s going to get heavy after awhile. Plan on eating something beforehand or keeping a snack bar with you for those moments when your tummy starts to growl.

Keep in mind, these are just a few things you should consider before setting out to shoot B-Roll. If you can think of a few more, add them to the list!

• 1. Get everyone on-board with the background BEFORE shooting – This usually proves to be quite tricky, but it’s super… no… uber-important to get your client (and yourself) on the same page with the look of the background. And collect feedback from ALL decision makers involved. It only takes one person to poop in the apple pie and the design you’ve been working on for the past two weeks is tossed out the window. This should also limit a constantly changing background during post-production which saves time with rendering, file writing, and uploading… and downloading… and re-uploading…
• 2. Request branding guidelines early – Find out what you can and cannot do with their branding designs and logo; what colors you can and cannot use, etc. Get those guidelines in front of your designers (or yourself) so you can give them enough time to work their magic.
• 3. Send Storyboards – Make sure your client knows what the background is going to look like. They don’t want any surprises and I’m guessing you wouldn’t either. So, if they expect an image of a kitty cat playing with tinfoil incorporated in the background, find that our early. But clarifying the look and feel of the background is especially important when dealing with training information. It’s important to confirm what info is going to appear when so you can frame the shot accordingly. And it’s helpful to include a subject within the storyboard to give you an idea of what a person looks like in the frame.
• 4. Consider your perspectives when designing your background – If you’re using more than one camera, make sure that the background perspective changes to match the camera angle. If the camera angle and/or framing on the person changes and the background doesn’t, your video is going to look pretty cheesy. That’s why it’s important to think about each camera’s focal length. Make sure the close-up shot appears more out of focus than the wide, and that the angle of the background matches the camera’s angle change.
• 5. Light to your background – The main reason you want your background finalized before shooting is so you can properly light on set to match the lighting motivation of your background. You need to sell to the viewer that the subject belongs in their environment and they don’t look out of place. So if the light spills off to the right, make sure you place the key light on your subject to appropriately. The background will also determine the placement of a hair light, or a scrape… or whether or not you even need them.
• 6. Scout your location – This goes without saying whenever it’s possible. If you have a choice, try not to shoot a green screen interview in a room with 8′ ceilings… with white ceiling tiles. This is because you need to be careful with the light that spills off the ceiling. That will cause plenty of post production issues. And be sure to find a room that has depth. You want to keep your subject away from the backdrop so you avoid the spill there too. It also softens the background – which helps even the levels of your backdrop.
• 7. Find a good Make-up Artist – (budget permitting) Find an experienced make-up artist who has done green screen before. They know what to look for. Let them worry about walking up to interviewees and patting their hair down. Trust me – that’s the last thing you want to do as your trying to get an interviewee to open up to you.
• 8. Get a monitor with Waveform display - You want to get your background as evenly lit as possible, and while you can develop an eye for that after a while, it’s always good to use a monitor with a waveform display so you can see your levels (we typically like to have our green screen at between 55 and 65 IRE). Light it so there are flat levels – you want to see a relatively straight line running across your screen.
• 9. Choose your camera wisely – A decision in pre-production with a direct impact on post. Not all cameras shoot the same. Not all collect the same color information. Know what information your camera does record, and understand of its output signal. The more color information your camera collects, the more room you have to play with in post. Oh, and another good idea is to turn off your camera’s sharpening option if it has one (the sharpening feature tends to add a thin black line around your subject that can be difficult to deal with in post).
• 10. Get comfortable with your keying software – Make sure you know your software’s limitations ahead of time. That way you know how meticulous you have to be to keep everyone’s hair in order. Generally speaking, the better the software the easier the key (but that’s a big generalization).
• 11. Remind your interviewees NOT to wear green – Sure. A very simple step. So simple, it’s easy to forget.

Well, hopefully this provides you with a basic understanding of things to think about when shooting green screen. There are certainly many more things to consider… but I’ll save those for another entry.

Here are some of the primary reasons to use green screen:

• Flexibility – Green screen allows us to be adaptable in dealing with clients that want to shoot multiple days and in a variety of locations. It also provides a level of consistency between the different office environments.
• Portability – Speaking of which, the portability of green screen is extremely beneficial. We can set up and break down a green screen set-up in about an hour. This prevents us from wandering about the office looking for colorful background elements, and it provides an out to a client’s suggestion of adding an office plant in the background.
• Extended Usability – Shooting interviews against a green screen also makes it easier to revisit projects in the future. It safeguards against any changes that might have taken place with company branding since last working on the project. Additional interviews can be shot and easily incorporated within the existing video.
• Branding – Green screen interviews also provide the ability to brand the piece with the company’s identity on a greater level. It also prevents the suggestion of sliding a mug emblazoned with the company logo into the foreground. Plus, the background is easy to modify.

All of these benefits of shooting green screen leads to the importance importance of Pre-Production. It’s easy in the chaos of planning to overlook these basic steps when heading in to a shoot. The follow-up posting to this article covers a few helpful hints that we thought we’d pass along when it comes to shooting green screen… (of course, we’ve never made any of these mistakes ourselves).

In any event, video marketing is nothing new, but we are expecting big things on the horizon for 2012 in terms of how often video is used to connect with customers or grow a brand’s fan base.

There is an emotional level of involvement with web video that immediately connects the viewer with your message, however you choose to tailor it. In fact, I feel this emotional connection is one of the most powerful attributes of web video marketing (just wrote an article discussing the five reasons why web video is so persuasive). Engaging your customers with video campaigns, whether you sell shoes or shelves, is rapidly becoming the smartest way to market.

So, if we agree on the power of web video, where are we going to see growth in 2012? Video testimonials from actual customers who appear trustworthy and honest are one of the best ways to turn a possible customer into a life-long customer. There are companies like Videogenie that are attempting to make the process of gathering organic video testimonials much easier. I think we’ll start to see some traction in this area; however, it will be a challenge balancing the quality of these videos alongside your other branded materials.

In addition to testimonial content, a recent article on Boston.com discusses other elements of web video marketing:

2012 is likely to be a banner year for video. Infinitely more emotional than text, video is a rich medium that fits perfectly within an ever more social web. 85% of Americans watch videos online, and they watch a lot of them too– over 1.3 billion (yes, billion) videos a day. Studies show far higher levels of engagement and customer conversion among brands that use video on their websites. Finally, 2012 may be the year in which video-powered social shopping technologies like (e)-motional, a tool that allows users to click on, share and purchase items without ever leaving a video, begin to catch on.

At the end of the day, video content shall propel some companies this year while those who fail to integrate video will be left behind. Be ahead of the game in your industry by including video marketing tools in your advertising plan for 2012. See what a difference it makes when customers can see your message, get a sense of who you are and tap into the emotional aspects of your brand.

Control

• The room – When we shoot on location, we pretty much vomit equipment everywhere. We take pictures and it all goes back together, but it can be unsettling when you see one of our guys… probably Jay… hooking a maffer clamp into your ceiling tiles.
• The overall environment – Shooting at the 522 Studio ensures that there are no disruptions to your staff’s workday. Trust me – no matter how well we behave on set, we can’t always please everyone.
• The light – shooting in a room with large windows can be tricky (i.e. time consuming) if there are no black-out blinds.
• The sound – Our studio has been specially treated with insulation to provide our interviews with clean professional audio.
• The schedule – If we’re shooting in the bosses office, the boss needs to be prepared to give our team at least an hour to properly prepare the room so he looks his best. He also needs to be prepared to host a few guests.

Space

• Location – Not every company has a large conference room. And many that do have some drawbacks to shooting video, such as a large immovable conference table, or being situated next to noisy elevator bays.
• Depth – Space provides depth of field (makes the background go out of focus) and flexibility to position lights in the most flattering positions on the subject.
• Height – Shooting in a room with low ceilings creates a lot of spill light that needs to be controlled because light bounces off white ceiling tiles. Our 11’ ceilings allow us to position lights pretty much whenever we want, enabling us to capture the best images possible.
• Privacy – Our green room provides an area for interviewees to relax or get work done prior to filming, or our make-up artist to ply her (or his) wares.

Efficiency

• Familiarity – Because we shoot at our studio so often, we know the environment. This helps us ensure that we stay as close to schedule as possible. We don’t have to wait for the building supervisor to turn off the air conditioning, or send a PA to find the fuse box.
• Limited interruptions – We know that there won’t be a conference next door that forces us to stop filming during breaks and that senior management won’t bump us out for a spur-of-the-moment meeting. We also know where to order lunch from… just ask Phil

A Day Out of the Office

• It’s always a nice change of pace for our clients to come hang out at the studio and not be bothered by constant interruptions. Plus, if we wrap early, that means you get to go home early!

All of these elements combine for a fast, efficient, and (occasionally) award-winning interview process. But in the immortal words of Reading Rainbow’s Lavar Burton – don’t just take my word for it. Check out our studio video for to see what we got going on.

Winning the Zero Moment of Truth – ZMOT All Around Us: youtu.be/Xn_uHK3f5pU via @youtube

— 522 Productions (@5TwentyTweet) January 20, 2012

A new global video channel for contemporary art [Youtube premium channel] – ow.ly/8BNhw

— 522 Productions (@5TwentyTweet) January 22, 2012

What A Preschool Teacher Taught Me About the Digital World talentzoo.com/digital-pivot/… via @talentzoo

— 522 Productions (@5TwentyTweet) January 20, 2012

Every Presentation Ever: Communication FAIL: youtu.be/3rHFNJnDPYY via @youtube

— 522 Productions (@5TwentyTweet) January 20, 2012

In addition to the natural filtering, Showyou provides the ability to “watch it later.” So, if I come across a video that I couldn’t finish or my Internet connection was slow, I could elect to save the video for a later time. Based on this feature alone, Showyou has been termed the “Instapaper of video.”

Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of the app is the interface…especially on the iPad. The Showyou initial screen is a collage of video thumbnails providing a feed of the most recently shared video content. By casually swiping through the collage, you get a quick visual cue to the types of videos available. This really makes the browsing process simple and fun.

So, if you haven’t had a chance to check out Showyou yet, I’d recommend giving it a try. If you have an iPad and love web videos, then this is a must-have app. To check out the top 11 videos shared in 2011, you can browse their article here.

Introducing Showyou.com from Showyou on Vimeo.

In order to keep up with web video technologies, I’m constantly checking out Content Delivery Networks and other open-source video players. Recently, I was contacted by Vidyard and had an opportunity to get a demo of their interface. On the surface, Vidyard has quite a few things going for it. Here are five reasons to checkout this video hosting platform:

• Integration with YouTube. For those of you that have a YouTube channel, it can be cumbersome to manage that video content and separate videos for your own website. However, Vidyard provides the capability to manage YouTube and other content with one application. Users can import content from YouTube or push out videos to their channel.
• Reporting Dashboard. If you have video content, you need to have detailed analytics. The data can tell you everything about how your videos are performing. Vidyard provides a comprehensive way to view data and even breaks down numbers from YouTube. In addition to just “total views,” Vidyard allows you to see the average attention span, total number of minutes watched, and the location of your viewer. I’ve also read that the company is collecting a lot of other data elements, so this area will probably continue to expand.
• Real-time Analytics. If you are launching a campaign, then real-time data can be extremely helpful. Vidyard provides real-time data for your video content, so you can see right away how your website visitors are reacting to the videos.
• Call to Action. Have you ever wanted to present a call to action at the end of your videos? How about in the middle of the video? Vidyard provides a way for you to include a call to action in each video you publish. You can elect to send visitors to another page on your website after the video is completed, or you can encourage viewers to take action during a specific time within the video. For call to actions created during video playback, VIdyard provides a “popout” box that slides out from the video.
• URL Redirect. Building upon the call to action functionality, Vidyard allows you to automatically set up a redirect after video playback is complete. So, if you’d like to send viewers to a contact form or services page, you can set this up for each video.

Ultimately, Vidyard has some great features so far. The service is very new, so I’m sure we’ll see some updates coming soon. But, if you’d like to get a brief overview, visit them at http://www.vidyard.com. Or, checkout the video below.

]]> http://www.522productions.com/vidyard-five-reasons-to-check-out-this-web-video-hosting-company/feed 0 http://www.522productions.com/the-new-youtube-interface-four-things-to-like http://www.522productions.com/the-new-youtube-interface-four-things-to-like#comments Sat, 10 Dec 2011 05:24:34 +0000 Tristan Pelligrino http://www.522productions.com/?p=442 In July of 2011, YouTube provided “Cosmic Panda” for web users to try out new features. Well, late last week, YouTube launched its new interface for everyone and included many of the features that were available in test mode over the last few months. Here are four things that I really like:
• Channels – The whole concept of a “channel” has really moved to the forefront with this new design. This is clearly evident with the new large “Add Channels” button in the top left corner. I believe that this focus on channels has a long-term benefit for YouTube and users. For example, content creators are now rewarded by gaining “subscribers” instead of just “views.” So, the content creators are focused more on long-term engagement with the viewers instead of a single viral video. On the other hand, users benefit as channels have a commitment to generating quality content…consistently.
• Filtering – Although the search field is still at the top, visitors now have more filtering functionality in the left sidebar. You can add your top channels in the sidebar and also filter videos by popularity, trends, etc. The new setup promotes filtering in lieu of searching for content.
• Social Media Integration- By connecting through popular social media networks such as Facebook or Twitter, you can see relevant videos appear in your main timeline. I haven’t seen this work too well yet, but I can see the possibilities. At some point, it would be valuable to go to YouTube whenever you want to see video…whether that is from friends, colleagues on Twitter, or through subscriptions.
• Design – I think the new design is much cleaner. The light gray background adds more sophistication to the site. The darker gray sidebar has a much more modern “feel” as well. Also, the main video stream on the homepage has larger thumbnails, which is much easier on the eye.

At this point, the latest changes do add a much more contemporary “feel” and the site definitely took a few steps forward. As more premium content channels make their way onto the site, we’ll see how everything comes together. In the long run, this approach promotes quality content and rewards those who can engage an audience on a consistent basis.

P.S. Check out the video below, which demonstrates some of the new features.

]]> http://www.522productions.com/the-new-youtube-interface-four-things-to-like/feed 0 http://www.522productions.com/checking-out-google-insights-for-search http://www.522productions.com/checking-out-google-insights-for-search#comments Mon, 05 Dec 2011 02:17:15 +0000 Tristan Pelligrino http://www.522productions.com/?p=438 Warning: call_user_func_array() expects parameter 1 to be a valid callback, function 'custom_excerpt_length' not found or invalid function name in /nfs/c10/h05/mnt/143431/domains/522productions.com/html/wp-includes/plugin.php on line 170
Continue Reading]]> Marketers are constantly looking for ways to justify their actions and answer questions about ROI. As a result, data has become a big part of analyzing digital marketing campaigns and results. But what about identifying trends and opportunities before you even start developing your digital marketing strategy?

Google’s latest “Insights for Search” tool provides a way to analyze search data, monitor trends, and identify opportunities. The tool provides a free way to analyze search patterns across regions, categories, and time frames. Basically, you have Google’s entire search database at your fingertips and can analyze information from 2004 to the present.

Here are a couple of practical applications of the tool:

• Identify industry trends by viewing keyword searches.
  Have you ever wondered what types of trends are popping up in your industry? The Google Insights for Search tool allows you to see what types of keywords are appearing more and more in searches. If you’re looking to keep your fingers on the pulse, then this tool is crucial for understanding how customers are searching for topics in your industry.
• Monitor trends within a specific geographic location or identify geographic areas for growth.
  For businesses that have a geographic focus, the search tool provides a way to filter searches based on location data. So, you can use the tool to follow trends for a particular region of the country and also identify areas of the country to target.
• Capture keywords that are being used in your industry.
  What are the terms that are being used to describe your services? Uncovering those hidden search phrases can be an excellent way to find new customers. Even though there are common search keywords for any industry, it can be a good practice to learn how customers are searching for services or products in different ways. The tool allows you to see different search phrases that are being used and you can filter keywords by industries.
• Explore common themes during specific time frames.
  The Google Insights for Search tool provides a filter so you can monitor virtually all data elements within a specific time frame. This functionality can be very useful for businesses that have sales fluctuations during certain periods of the year. More specifically, if your business experiences peak sales during the holidays, then it may be very helpful to view the previous holiday season’s search criteria.

Once I saw the capabilities offered by Google Insights, I immediately decided to dive in and conduct some research. I searched for results related to digital marketing, web design and development, and video production. And, I must say, I was quite surprised by some of the results. But it’s going to be even more interesting to see how businesses use this type of data for growth. After all, analyzing the data is just the first step…determining which actions to take is what ultimately separates your business from the competition.

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