What Are You Afraid Of?

Posted by diana & filed under Uncategorized.

So many people are sitting on the sidelines these days. What is it going to take to get us back in the game? I think fear is the main problem – even among entrepreneurs…the bravest among us.
It's like learning how to ride a bike

That amazing feeling of accomplishment



What it feels like to ride a bike for the first time.
We can’t lay claim to this video. It belongs to Kathryn Dangers, but I want to share it with you here, because it is one of the most inspiring videos I have seen in a while. (enjoy)



Here are the top three fears I have noticed;
1. Fear of failure

2. Fear of Success

3. Fear of being found out (a feeling of unworthiness)

Let’s talk about the fear of failure first. It is the most common. Doesn’t it come down to the fear that if you put yourself out there and really follow the the thing you love – follow your dreams, and fail, what will you have to hope for? A daunting thought. No wonder we procrastinate. My suggestion is to start small. Move your dream a little closer each day – even if you are only studying and thinking about it. Keep it top of mind, and your subconscious will see the opportunities as they present themselves and open the doors. These doors – these possibilities are what everyone who wants to do anything creative or extraordinary has to get through.

Fear of success. Sounds strange. Why would anyone be afraid to succeed? Because you know deep down that it changes things. It will change the way people think about you. It can cause conflict, you may lose friends, or you may have to make difficult personal decisions, because with success comes responsibility. Believe it or not, success can be uncomfortable. And once achieved, comes that “Now what?” moment. For those of us who take comfort in our routines – the pattern of our lives can be disrupted forever with the brake through that sometimes comes with success. This may be why we find ourselves sometimes self sabotaging our own efforts. If you catch yourself doing this…Stop and think. What am I afraid of? The best way to do something new or different is to place a higher priority on it. Attack it first, clear the time in your life for this project. Ask yourself WHY do I really want this? Is whatever I have to go through, or whatever the consequences may be… will it be worth doing? If so, power through.

And finally, addressing that feeling of “I’m not worthy”… We all run that private script in our heads. Even the most successful among us do it. But success and happiness are meant to go together like peanut butter and jelly. It is OK to take a chance and be rewarded for your effort. Because most people never even try. Congratulate yourself on your attempt – even if it doesn’t work out exactly to plan. But when it does – celebrate it! And set another goal. Winning is as much a part of the process of learning as anything. The example of falling off your bike repeatedly in the process of learning is cliché, but remember flying down the hill with confidence once you mastered that new skill? That is what I am talking about! Enjoy the ride.

Using Video to Win Customers

Posted by diana & filed under Uncategorized.

Today’s topic is about using video to get attention to your business, and how to convert that attention into sales. but to do so, I first have to talk about first impressions and relationships. First Impressions: Why do they say to visualize your audience in their underwear? well, perhaps in the case of internet advertising, your audience very well may be surfing the web in their skivies…But generally it is to help remind us that our audience is human too.

If you look at most websites, it would seem that many businesses have forgotten this point. Sites are filled with facts about the company themselves, and features and benefits…. And these are very important, of course. They must be readily available and easy to navigate. But before you just hand over the keys to the kingdom – the information – wouldn’t you like to know who you are talking to first?

Video is of course a great vehicle by which to make an impression: But before they click play – they first have to find the video and want to click.

Here is how a video get’s found…

Advantage of Video
    1. Just run a Google or Bing search on any topic, and links to video clips pop up right on page one. The reason for this is that search engines are going out of their way to provide blended search results–links to news, blog posts, photos, video, old powerpoint presentations and other specialized content all mixed together.Keywords are laces through all the other modes of communication, and make your site findable by the crawlers… Yet many businesses are not yet taking full advantage of this opportunity. They are not even using web-based video. And when they do, they are too frequently disregarding video SEO all together, or are trying but doing it themselves, and frequently get it wrong.
Old-school SEO combines text, meta data, a linking strategy and site maps to raise a page’s search engine profile and ensure proper indexing. These techniques fall short for video, which has no text to index.


    2. You must submit your videos properly to the search engines. Carefully research each search engine to determine its requirements. Read the article directly below this blog and follow the step by step instructions of this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijr7S10fOqc to ensure video is included in the results, search engines give them preferential treatment.
 And act fast, even now this is changing with the advancments of voice recognition, soon videos may be searchable. Nothing is totally easy or automatic  -  You may be able to do a low budget video with your flip phone, and even get to the top of google rankings by being one of the lucky videos that “go viral” but will it convert to sales?

Once found: You should first make an emotional connection to your audience. Before anyone makes a buying decision, they have already judged whether you are the kind of person/business they want to do business with.

People want to do business with people and companies they like.

What makes them like you? – How you make THEM feel.

It is always the take away. They will not necessarily remember all the facts from the research they are doing, but they will always remember how you make them feel.

Nike makes you feel – hip and empowered

Johnson and Johnson – makes you feel safe and comforted

Apple – makes you feel intelligent and – part of the in crowd

Budweiser – makes you feel popular, – one of the guys- and fun-loving

  A better way to reach a busy audience,


  1. Know who they are – 4 types of personalities, bottom line decision makers, Annalists, Systems people and people who make decisions with gut instinct or intuition.
  2. A busy audience would rather do their own research than meet with you or your salesperson
  3. Too much information to read
  4. Video communicates on three of the 5 senses: Auditory, visual, and feeling Yes – emotion
  5. Video is the best way to get your story out, and as you are telling your story, Put yourself in your audience’s mindset and share your story and speak to them from their point of view. What are their concerns? What is their why?


    • What are they interested in and what are they struggling with?
    • How do they make decisions? Are they bottom line people, action people, thinkers, process orented people or intuitive?
 

Subtly handle their most common objections if possible.

  Or create a separate video to handle each objection, and allow the audience to select the ones that resonate with them.

Content is King – yes, but we have all heard the axom: Telling is not selling -  You may notice that in our effort to provide our audience with the information they are looking for, try not to get in your own way of a potential sale.

If you make your point by telling a story you are creating a memory – Sometimes called hooks, onto which to hang a memory in our brains for easier recall later.

I once took a memory enhancing course, and learned about “hooks” mechanisms we use to associate things we want to remember in our minds.

Yes content is king, but without CONTEXT – they may remember the facts, but will they associate it with you when it comes time to make the buying decision? By using story to sell, you are inexorably linked or hooked to the information or solution your audience seeks. Ask yourself;

When you recommend a movie, do you always remember the title? the director, the actor or is the stronger memory: the story?

Do you remember the stories from history class, or do you remember the dates, and places and names?

A story makes a stronger bond in our minds – a longer lasting impression, and told right will resonate, stir an emotion and inspire a response.

ASK for the SALE

After the connection is made you need to ask for the sale:

There should be a Call to action on every page

1. A certain number of people are going to buy just because you asked them to

2. Most will want to think about it or do more research…

But if you engage your audience with a compelling story, and they go to a website that does not match the message, convey the same personality you are going to loose the opportunity.

Continuity of message: Direct Mail may be dead, but direct marketing lives on re-incarnated on the internet. Use the tried and true techniques reapplied to the new medium:

Tease them before you give the info – This is a conversation. The reader needs to give a little something too – their contact info and agree to a dialogue.

Don’t hide your phone number – if what you want is a dialog – why on earth would you make it hard to talk to someone? Don’t hide your mailing address

Don’t hide your physical street address – unless there is a reason to hide

Make buying easy:  People may not want to be sold, but they love to buy

Give them a big skooshy button to push, and buy now!, ask for more info, try it, taste it. Vote for it…

Follow through:

Provide a guarantee – the game is not over at the point of sale.

Ask for referral:

It is relationship marketing offer a way to keep the dialogue going. Add to our mailing list, offer a news letter, ask permission and make it valuable to them.

And in closing, the medium is not the message. Video may be the darling today, tomorrow it may be holograms or something we have yet to even dream of, but as long as we are selling to people, it will always come down to the human relationship. Did you move them? Do they like you?

Videos do not stand alone as your magic solution. Strongest as part of a campaign, and particularly as part of an experience.

Your story, told with passion – will always be the winning recipe for sales.

 

Guarilla in the myst – the use of video for one start up company

Posted by admin & filed under Business Bloggin.

Guarilla Marketing is an effective and affordable tool – giving small budgets big power. How do you explain why you need something that you never knew you needed? That was the problem – literally at hand for the new brand; Celluwipes – a germ killing, safe for your electronics, wipe – used to clean the screen on your cell pone or other touch screen appliances.  

 Celluwipes Commercial titled “Wipe-out Trailer” grabbed the attention of movie going audiences and helped launch Celluwipe into Walgreen stores throughout the soutwest giving this start-up company the boost they needed to launch.

We proposed the following concept to our customer, Celluwipes, for a promotional video created to appear as a movie trailer. It premiered at the prestigious International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival held in Tempe, Arizona. The video was quickly posted on various media sharing sites including our customer’s website which we created, in the hope that it would go viral and be shared voluntarily one friend at a time and make a play for viral video fame.

We arranged for the IHSFFF to run our trailer before each film and got down to preproduction. We decided on a post-apocalyptic setting for our trailer and the theme would be the destruction of civilization brought about by not cleaning your cell phone regularly with Celluwipes.

After scouting locations we chose Davis Salvage Company located in Phoenix. In the video we used some interesting props worth mentioning. The crushed shopping cart was a found item at our location. We purchased an actual Vintage Geiger counter and used our own Phoenix audio and video rental equipment, all of which can be found on our site. The antelope skull was rented and needed to be handled with great care. We also rented the hazmat suits and gas masks. Most other items seen in the video were donated by the crew. We purchased some Madagascar hissing cockroaches from a local pet shop seen crawling over the skull in the opening shot and we can guarantee from our cockroach wrangler ,Sean Walter, that no cockroaches were injured during production. In fact the opportunity effected their escape back to the wild, no doubt destabilizing the delicate eco-system of Dave’s Salvage Yard.

A key person in our production was Director of Photography Webb Pickersgill. We work with many directors of photography and Webb is one of our favorites. Webb always brings a high level of creativity to every project and is flexible and easy to work with. His work on the set and during post-production was super-human.

Shooting began at 5 PM. We waited for darkness to descend. In total we were on site for about six hours with cast members melting in their HazMat suits.  The editing went quickly and our Premiere and customer’s new product announcement debuted on October 15, 2010. taking home the silver at the Addy awards competition this year as well.

   

DWWMedia’s first Commercial Spot Nominated for an Emmy

Posted by admin & filed under Video Marketing.

We are very proud to announce that Dynamic Media’s first commercial spot for “Sting-N-Linger” was nominated for a Rocky Mountain Emmy in the category of “Photography – Short Form” !!! Director of Photography , Webb Pickersgill, was so proud of the work he did for us on the “Sting-N-Linger” commercial that he entered the “mock- day-time-drama” into the Emmy competition. The video was shot to look like a Spanish “Novella” – brightly colored with over-the-top costumes, make-up AND acting. Performances by Cesar Garcia and Karla Marquez were delightful and funny. The spot can be viewed at http://www.stingnlinger.com/ or on the Dynamic Worldwide Media site at http://www.dwwmedia.com and on YouTube where it was designed to play to drive attention and traffic to the “Sting-N-Linger” Salsa Company’s newly designed website, also produced by Dynamic Worldwide Media. We were delighted to take home the Bronze Addy for this fun video last March.  

10th Anniversary Phoenix Film Festival FREE Highlights reel update

Posted by admin & filed under Business Bloggin.

We are making good progress. Tons of excellent footage is being shaped into a cohesive story. This video will serve as an excellent souvenir of the event, and fill in the blanks with moments you may have missed. Even if you attended this years Phoenix Film Festival, you can’t be everywhere at the same time. That’s why Dynamic Worldwide Media was there to document it all for you. April 15th at the Harkins 101 Theater in Scottsdale Arizona. If you are among the many attendees that have requested the FREE VIDEO check back here often to see our progress. It should be available for downland soon. If you are interested in the full Directors cut, it will cover in detail the many panel discussions, excellent interviews with film makers, and many extras…well worth the $15 sale price. Just e-mail us to let us know you are interested, and we will notify you when the DVD is ready.

Watch this space…

Posted by admin & filed under Business Bloggin.

 

Dynamic Worldwide Media is the official Media Partner for the Tenth Anniversary Phoenix Film Festival held April 15th at the Harkins 101 Theater in Scottsdale Arizona. If you are among the many attendees that have requested the FREE Highlights reel from the event, you will want to watch this space as the project develops. You are invited to come back frequently to see photos from the event, and updates on the making of your video as it progresses. Compiling and editing should take just a few weeks. Once finished we will send you an e-mail link to download the video. We have footage of the Gala opening night, Dan Harkin’s delightful acceptance speech, and several great interviews with actors, directors, movers and shakers…all the way through the closing night festivities featuring the film “Middle Men” with Luke Wilson and Giovanni Ribisi.

It is still not too late to up-grade to the Extended Directors cut version. If you are a student of film making or just a lover of independent films this is a rare opportunity to learn from the best. Award winning directors, writers, producers and support businesses such as casting and legal advisors share their personal stories and expertise in all the panel discussions that took place at this year’s seminars under the big white tent. A wealth of information for a mere $15.

If you don’t want you to miss this opportunity go to www.dwwmedia.com or e-mail your request to sales@dwwmedia.com

interviews

Learn a Thing or Two About Visual FX

Posted by admin & filed under Video Marketing.

Today’s project is for a faithful client of ours called Sting N Linger, a salsa company in Arizona (they make excellent Marinara sauce, too). Before we get into the project, however, let me talk briefly about visual effects. Thinking outside the box is a concept that has been tossed around the corporate playground like a dodge ball for as long as any of us can remember. Many use the phrase, few truly understand the depth of what it means, and even fewer truly understand the depth of how it applies to the art of visual effects. When it comes to the business of vfx, you’ll find that ninety percent of the job boils down to good old fashioned problem solving. Creating lightsabers, explosions, CGI cats, and glowing swooshes is a valuable skill, but that’s all technical know-how that can be taught in a classroom. Problem solving can only come with experience. If you have a natural talent for figuring things out, you just might have a bright future as a Hollywood effects artist.
  • “CGI” Stands for “Computer Generated Imagery” and generally refers to anything in the shot that was created digitally and inserted afterwards.
Today I’m going to give you some insight into the realm of my profession, and how the aforementioned box must be thought outside of in order to execute it effectively. First off, let me just start by saying that there is no “can’t” in the realm of media production. No matter how difficult it may be to create a comp, telling your client that it simply can’t be done is not an option. Visual effects is like a maze; There’s always a path to your destination hidden somewhere amidst the dead ends, the key is finding it. And hey, if all else fails, just hug the left wall and move forward.
  • Short for “composite” or “composition”, a comp is any shot where multiple elements are combined together to make one shot.
Anyways, now that I’ve hopefully familiarized you with the proper vfx mindset, lets dive into the project at hand. First, let me give the project some context; in winter of 2010 we decided to shoot an online commercial for Sting N Linger promoting their product, in which a beautiful young lady enchants her lover with a passionate, spicy kiss (ignited by the Sting N Linger salsa, of course). The final shot in the commercial features the two young lovers sitting down on the sofa to enjoy a romantic evening, with the Sting N Linger products laid out on the coffee table in front of them. The depth of field is set so that the products are in focus, and the actors are out of focus in the backdrop (as shown in the image below below)
  • “Depth of Field” Refers to the range of focus for a camera or camcorder. A deep depth of field will mean that the area of focus will extend far away from the lens. A shallow depth of field means that only a small area will be in focus. Having a shallow depth of field gives the shot a much more cinematic and professional look.
To add effect, we decided to have them bump the table and have the jar of Sting N Linger move (true love doesn’t step around furniture). Here’s where the movie magic aspect comes into play. The way the scene was laid out on set, it was too impractical to have the actors physically bump the table. First off, the distance of the table from the couch meant going out of their way to actually bump it. The other problem was that, when bumped, the table would absorb most of the shock, leaving the Sting N Linger jar to remain relatively motionless. For the effect, we really needed that jar to move a lot for authenticity. The solution? Have our Art Director lay under the table and hit it, then attach a string to the jar and have our head of marketing stand off camera and jerk the jar sideways slightly. My job in this whole ordeal? To digitally remove the string in post, and make it look authentic.
  • “Post” is short for “post-production”. The typical production of a movie, tv show or commercial is sectioned off into three major phases; Pre-Production, Production, and Post-Production. Pre-production (referred to simply as “pre”) is anything before the actual filming. This includes scriptwriting, casting, set designing, storyboarding, costume designing, script readings, financing, scheduling, budgeting, screen tests, previsual animations, location scouting, etc. Production is the actual filming. This is what happens after all the preparation. Post-Production is what happens after the movie is filmed. It includes the editing, sound fx, compositing, color-correction, and final rendering. What I do falls into the realm of post-production.
This shot was actually trickier than it looked. Digitally removing anything from a shot with movement in it is never a point-and-click process. Sometimes compositors even have to create a 3D model of the scene and recreate the movement just to get rid of something like a camera rig or a light stand.
  • A “compositor” is an artist who specializes in creating composite shots. The name “compositor” is very general, however, and more focused titles within it are “motion graphics designer” or “visual effects artist”.
There were a couple of problems with mine. First off, time reasons prevented them from shooting a plate. As a compositor, you won’t always get one of these. While they’re nice to have, sometimes circumstances simply prevent the director or cinematographer from actually getting one. This is where the problem solving comes into play.
  • A plate is a neutral shot used for visual fx purposes. A plate shot, sometimes referred to as a “clean plate”, is a master clip that all the other elements lay on top of. Example: if I had footage of a conversation in a movie, and the only way they could properly mic the actors was to actually have the microphone equipment right next to them in the shot, I would have to digitally remove that equipment. The ideal way to do so would be to have the director redo the shot the exact same way, but with no actors or microphone equipment in the shot; just the backdrop. That way, I’d have a background plate, or “clean plate”, with nothing in the foreground, so I could literally just erase the microphone from the other shot, and it would display the identical backdrop underneath flawlessly.
  • The cinematographer is one of the unsung heroes of production. Many think the director is in charge of how everything is shot, and in a way he is… he’s in charge of everything. But the cinematographer is a professional that specializes in the camera. The gaffer is the one in charge of setting up the lighting, but the cinematographer is in charge of getting the light settings in the camera just right, and the color balance, and the composition, and the proper lenses, angle, etc. A visually stunning film is such because of the cinematographer. They are masters of light, color, and composition.
The other big problem was that, while the actors themselves didn’t cross behind the string that was attached to the jar, their movements affected the light and position of the pillows on the sofa. That makes the job infinitely more complicated. The reason is because, if there was absolutely no movement behind the string, I’d simply have to digitally remove the string from a single frame in Photoshop, then crop out that one side and overlay it. Since there’s no movement, it wouldn’t matter that it was a video, because they’d be blended together and no one would ever know that one whole side of the shot was just a still image. But there is movement, which means that the pillows will be changing in relation to the rest of the environment, and if I just laid a still image over one end, there would be a very visible seam that marked the edge of the crop as the rest of the shot moved.
  • A frame is one of many images that make up a video. Film and video aren’t magical, as most people know, they’re actually a series of still images being played at high speed to give the illusion of movement; which is exactly how animation works. The theory of film and animation come from the same roots. A frame is simply one of those images. NOTE: the framerate is the amount of frames that play in a second of video. Different framerates can give a different feel. The NTSC framerate (basically the broadcast standard for North America) is 29.97 fps (frames per second). The classic film framerate is 24 fps, which makes the project look more cinematic (the Sting N Linger commercial was shot at 24 fps).
My solution was still to eliminate the movement from the backdrop. The backdrop being out of focus worked to my advantage as I could simply blur the edge of the mask (called “feathering”) and the soft edge would blend into the backdrop.
  • A mask is what you use to crop parts of a video out. If you have an airplane that you want to have sitting on a runway during a shot, and the airplane is actually in a parking lot in its shot, you would mask out the plane, which would isolate it, then put it into the other shot.
The first thing I did was take a single frame of the video and digitally remove the string in Photoshop. Photoshop is a very valuable asset to a professional compositor or motion graphics designer. It’s usually the first step to creating a convincing composite. In this case, I also used a special tool in Photoshop to digitally remove the jar of salsa and the actors. That’s right, I didn’t have a clean plate, so I made one. I know that picture looks messy, but I only got rid of what I needed to. There’s no sense spending hours removing what won’t show up in the final product. My next step was to import the footage for the shot and the augmented still (which I called “difference”) into Adobe After Effects. After Effects is a lot like Photoshop; you can edit content and make composites. The difference is that Photoshop is for images and photography, while After Effects has a timeline and is designed for manipulating videos. Thus, the tools are more geared towards video production. My next step was to drop the “difference” image into the comp below the clip. This means if I were to hide the clip, it would show the image beneath it. From there, I cracked my knuckles and grabbed a soda, because I was going to do some rotoscoping (I’ll explain what that is momentarily). I masked out the whole left side of the clip around the jar so that the background plate I created showed through. This effectively eliminated the string… for this one frame. The problem is that the shot is about five and a half seconds long, and it plays at a rate of twenty-four frames per second. The trick isn’t removing the string for a single frame, it’s removing it for all the frames in succession without it looking weird. Because of this, I had to enable the keyframes on the mask’s position and go through every single frame, moving it to match the position of the actress’s shirt (if the mask overlapped, it would make her back disappear into thin air!). Notice all those little diamonds in succession in the below picture. Each one of those little diamonds is a keyframe, and contains the position data for that individual frame.
  • Believe or not, the word “keyframe” is actually self-explanatory. Key=important, integral, pivotal, and then we just explained what a frame is. A keyframe is a frame where something important happens. It’s a key frame. You know… keyframe. It’s actually an animator’s term. In the digital world, a keyframe is a frame in which data is stored for the parameters of a certain element in your composition. Keyframes will always fade between each other. For example, if I wanted a logo to start at the top of the screen and move down to the bottom, I would go to the first frame, set a keyframe and move the logo to the top. Then I’d move over, say, ten frames, then set another keyframe and move the logo to the bottom. The logo would then move from the top to the bottom between those ten frames. Again, the frames in between are not keyframes; they do not store any data. The regular frames only transition between point A, which is keyframe 1, and point B, which is keyframe 2.
This process is called rotoscoping, and dates back to the early days of Disney film and animation when Walt Disney invented the Rotoscope; a table that projected a still frame onto a piece of paper, which a rookie animator or an intern would then trace over. The process of rotoscoping is considered painstaking in most instances as it always involves tweaking the composition for every single frame in order to make it work. Compositors and animators always turn to rotoscoping as a last resort. Most projects involve small amounts of it, but the positive side is that it’s almost always a sure fire way to make it work. In my case, rotoscoping this shot is cake compared to some other projects I’ve done. There have been instances where I’ve had to rotoscope entire bodies for two and a half minutes at thirty frames per second. That’s over four thousand frames to go through individually as opposed to the hundred or so frames I’ll have to go through for this shot. Pretty nice in comparison! The rotoscoping was the last major step in the project. Once I had rotoscoped the mask, the majority of the work was done. From there, I simply color-corrected the still to match the light in the video, and voila! To view the full commercial from start to finish, you can visit the following link: http://clients.dwwmedia.com/stingnlinger/index.php/component/content/article/4-video/3-video It also helped that my logo animation was overlayed on top of the final shot, which draws the eye away from the backdrop. I hope this gave you some fascinating insight into my world. Be sure to check back for more updates in the blog from some of our other experienced staff, and myself. Happy creating, Evan Sprague Senior Video Producer Dynamic Worldwide Media