M-1 Studios Video Production Blog

As the City of Royal Oak gears up to host its first-ever Arts, Beats & Eats — Oakland County’s favorite summer festival — M-1 Studios is pleased to announce that the company is the Official Video Sponsor for the event.

Currently in its third year of business in the greater Detroit area, M-1 Studios focuses on helping businesses and organizations create effective commercial video productions as a part of their marketing, both in traditional formats such as television, as well as newer social media outlets. M-1 Studios uses high-definition cameras and specialized audio equipment in all of their documentary productions.

As part of their association with the Royal Oak Chamber of Commerce, M-1 Studios was introduced to the Arts, Beats & Eats management team as they transitioned moving the festival from Pontiac to Royal Oak. M-1 Studios’ extensive background in event coverage and professionalism in the video production realm were key factors in the decision to choose M-1 Studios as the Official Videographer for the entire festival this year.  The M-1 Studios office will be the main meeting point for their team of experienced camera operators, producers and interviewers that will be covering each day of the festival.

M-1 Studios will be present for all four days of Arts, Beats & Eats. There will be a focus on the artists that are a part of the festival, the sponsors of the event, and the vendors that will be supplying the amazing and diverse line-up of food and events. Most importantly, there will be a focus on those attending the festival and capturing their experience.

“M-1 Studios is excited about the opportunity to document the energy, fun and excitement that the 2010 Arts, Beats & Eats festival brings to the 2010 Labor Day Weekend here in Michigan,” said Matthew Peach, President, M-1 Studios. “We will strive to incorporate an overview and diversity of the festival’s offerings in entertainment, culture and food service with the upcoming video productions.”

I’m about go bananas. So few times do I ever see an example of Do-It-Yourself video done right that when I do see it I got all hot and bothered.

Apologies, Preston.

First, some context. I’m obviously biased here, as making professional video every day is how I pay my bills. It would seem natural for me to feel the knife of despair twist in my heart whenever somebody advocates doing “Flip cam style” video for their own marketing purposes because I’m somehow missing out on an opportunity to sell my own services. There may be a grain of truth to that, but honestly, the knife twists in me because so few people know what to do with a camera in their hand.  Most other people end up damaging themselves and their business reputation by having BAD video (a.k.a. D.I.Y. video) versus no video at all. Also, “Flip cam style” video usually becomes “my head talking and talking and talking” with very few interesting shots or editing going on, which is almost always the kiss-of-death when it comes to online video. Snoozefest 2010, coming to a laptop near you.

Behold, somebody who got it right. I dare you to just watch a few seconds.

This may not be the most exciting web video ever, but let’s go through what Preston, the guy in the video above, did right here.

(1) Big title text for the first few seconds. Not only does Preston know how to use spell-check, any video thumbnail that gets grabbed from the beginning of this video will be exactly what the title of the video is. Shut my mouth! Coherence!

(2) By the first 20 seconds he hooks you in with the setup/problem with “…we frequently fall into the trap of…” He doesn’t spend time messing around. If you were remotely interested in this topic before you clicked “Play,” he’s now got you hooked for the next minute at the 20-second mark. He gets right to point. Hallelujah!

(3) Its 1 minute and 22 seconds. Not 2 minutes. Not 5 minutes of rambling generalities. Short and sweet.

(4) A big one: The background is very dark, but he himself is very brightly and evenly lit. This is probably my favorite thing about this video. Do you see how Preston “pops” out of the background? Looking at something that is aesthetic, which is heavily influenced by lighting, makes our subconscious more accepting of whatever we’re watching.

(5) The close-up. The text is huge. Preston held the camera up close to make his head large relative to the frame. That is knowing how to use small embedded web players in our tiny-video world.

(6) Music. Always helps fill the boring void behind a spoken monologue.

(7) Finally, the biggest: Preston isn’t an amateur. Whether he practiced this particular monologue or not I don’t know, but he obviously knows what he’s talking about because the video isn’t littered with awkward pauses and “Um”s. He’s not a natural, but he’s natural with us- the audience. He’s not putting on some forced personality and he’s not trying to impress us. So many times people want to try to show how smart or funny they are or feel like that have to become a “personality” and it all comes off as fake. Or sometimes people are just themselves and suck at it and lack objectivity or honesty about evaluating themselves. Kiss of death, y’all, but not here.

———

I tried to outline the above reasons without talking about Preston’s content. Full disclosure: I co-run a small business, so this whole leadership/management thing was of interest to me personally. It may not be to you. He uses a lot of buzzwords. His content will go over the heads of the wrong audience, but there are structural and other things Preston did in this short video that make it good independent of its content. It warms my heart to see video-literacy in Do-It-Yourself action.

Rob Gulley
M-1 Studios

www.twitter.com

Twitter, once thought of as a source for individual announcements and communication between friends (and the occasional online celebrity), is an ever-expanding resource that is being widely adopted for marketing purposes for companies, musicians, organizations.

There’s been many successful stories about how well-established businesses (Comcast, Starbucks) utilize Twitter as a resource to reach out to their customers directly and respond to their inquiries and comments.

However, when thinking about your business, there’s a right away and a wrong way to approach Twitter and how you use it- and we’ll mention a great resource at the end of this post to navigate your way through the Twitter universe effectively.

One of the biggest questions that Twitter repeatedly gets asked is “Will video tweets at some point be available?”  And their answer up to this point has been a resounding no.  However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t still get the word out there about your new video link in 140 characters or less, by embedding a link to your video within a tweet.

The problem is that Youtube links can be fairly long, and when every character counts in that magic number of 140, you don’t want to be wasting any that you could be using to convey an additional part of your marketing message.

Here’s a sample Youtube link that we’d like to post as a Twitter update:

http://www.youtube.com/michigan1studios#p/u/6/TxTIv20Gz-o

That link right there alone is 57 characters.  But if we use the website http://bit.ly (basically a URL shortener) and copy that link into there, we get returned a much smaller link that will still lead someone from our tweet to the video we’ve uploaded:

http://bit.ly/auDRbx

20 characters, a savings of 37 characters that we can use to our full advantage when composing our tweet!

For learning more about Twitter and what it could mean for your business or organization, check out Corey Perlman’s eBootCamp at http://www.facebook.com/ebootcamp and eBootCamp University sessions at http://www.ebootcampuniversity.com/

Whenever you see a scene in a film or television show that involves characters sitting at a restaurant and talking, there’s usually a pretty good chance that all the characters in the background are extras hired specifically to fill the restaurant up as customers for that particular scene. And there’s also a good chance that in order to record the dialogue of the characters clearly, all the extras are being as quiet as possible, to the point of mouthing fake words as conversation to each other.

Afterwards, the sound design team puts together all the elements of the scene; it’s the background noise of what they’ve decided the restaurant should sound like. This background can include customers interacting, food being cooked and served, music, the door opening and closing, and so on.

One of the biggest challenges for a sound designer is getting the right amount of background customer noise recreated for a restaurant. Ever watch an independent movie where there only appears to be the two characters in the entire restaurant, yet knives and forks seem to be clinking about 2 inches away from your ears? That’s a sign of poor sound design; you don’t feel immersed in the scene, you become distracted by its sound elements.

So how does one go about creating that perfect background noise for a bar or restaurant? Sound designers can bring in sound effects from their vast library in order to create a feeling. However, sometimes these sound effects for backgrounds just don’t match up what’s really going on in the scene. For those instances, a field recorder and microphone can be dispatched (by the foley artist) to record bar & restaurant sounds on location that can be used for the scene.

So the next time you’re watching a movie scene between characters in a restaurant, go back and watch it a second time and listen for the layers of sound design that exist “behind the scenes”. If a sound designer has done his or her job well, the sound blends into the background, vs. taking it over.

When it comes to setting up a high quality commercial video production, one of the most important elements to consider is lighting- not only your subject, but the space in which they occupy.  Entire books and courses are available on all of the different aspects of lighting and cinematography; we’re going to focus here on what is sometimes referred to as a three-point lighting technique to get you started.

For the purposes of this exercise, let’s assume you have a subject sitting on a chair in the middle of a room, with a dark grey background behind them.  You want to conduct an interview with them and have some lights available to use.  We won’t go into specific details about the kinds of lights and wattage.  Instead, we’re thinking about what we’re going to need in terms of light sources.

The first rule that you have to remember is: lighting just isn’t shining a light in a person’s general direction so that they’re “lit”, nor is it turning on all the lights you manage to find that hang overhead.  And turning on a table lamp usually creates a blurry white/yellow blob on the screen, especially in video.

So what you want to start out with in our example is the following three light sources, and then build from there:

1. A key light.  You have to light the person’s face and upper body, not usually directly on them but coming from a slight angle so that the light isn’t powerfully making your subject look too bright or “blown out”.

2. A back light.  Yes, the interview subject is the person that we want to see in this case, especially if we have a dark grey background behind them.  But without some light on this actual background, or behind your subject in some form to give some depth to your location, your subject has a greater chance of blurring in with this background.  The goal here is to create a depth of field where your interview subject is separated from the background.

3. An “edge” light.  This is a light that might come from above or the side, that gives your subject an “edge” that further defines them and separates them from the background.  Think of it as creating “3D” but not in the 3D terminology you’ve been hearing about lately.  Next time you’re watching an interview on TV, look to the person’s left or right-hand side.  See how they have an edge glow about them?  That’s the edge light for the subject at work.  This is also sometimes referred to as a “fill” light, and it could be placed in a different location.

From there, you can get creative with lights that further define the background, using gels to change the main light on your subject, altering the position of the edge light- endless possibilities (and make sure you’re always looking at your shot to see that everything’s set correctly).

Just don’t turn on a light overhead and think that your scene is “lit”.  In fact if you do it correctly, you might turn off all the actual lights in the room, because you’ve created the ideal light for your subject and situation using the tools at hand.