Room for Innovation

(note - having some trouble getting this embed to fit, click here to see in full YouTube glory)

Commissioned to create a short doco/promo piece on a new space for teaching Innovation, I thought this would be the perfect time to bring my new HDSLR - the Canon 7D, in to play. There are a lot of workflow considerations to discuss and this piece is intercut with plenty of archival HDV b-roll and the occasional Panasonic AVCHD wide shot (the Panny was also the audio master for the piece), but the cinematic quality of the new cam provided production values higher than I ever expected, even though I've run a few jobs on this same platform with the Canon T1i, which I shot with strictly to get better low-light perfomance.

SO, can ya tell which shots we stretched on? Fun ;-)

My First Documentary Film: Leadership and Theater

(click the video to watch full size on YouTube)

What does theater have to do with business ethics and leadership? In the spring of 2009, 24 MBA students at the Darden School of Business in Charlottesville learned more about the connection as they took Professor Ed Freeman's "Leadership and Theater: Ethics, Innovation, and Creativity" class. In addition to acting and directing exercises, the student's final project was writing, directing, and acting in a full-length play. This documentary follows the students throughout the class, with the grand finale of the performance.

See supporting materials at the Leadership and Theater Website.

Making the Case

So here's a piece I've been working on for nearly a year that's not so phenomenal for its production value or editorial finesse, but simply in value-to-client. We've had this on YouTube for a few days, and we're averaging 200+ views daily. Nice!

There are a few reasons I'll never forget this one. First being that I spent a week doing the multicam edit (it was a three camera shoot with backup audio on another system) on an older Avid before that system died completly, taking the project files and all the media along with it. The second memorable "event" in this piece was a client management situation I learned SO much from. Months into the project, a second producer came in from the marketing side, essentially speaking a different language than the rest of us. Had I sat everyone down in a room and said "let's get on the same page" from the get-go, it would have been fine. Truth was, the new producer had a completly different concept in mind(with the same "name" we had been throwing around months prior to her arrival), and the poor dear couldn't figure out why on earth we didn't "get it". Lesson learned: New person comes on, you sit down with the entire team and MAKE SURE you're on the same page, speaking the same language.

That being said, there were two realy shining moments to this project for me:

1. Amazing Talent: Professor Rodriguez is a wonderful person and teacher, on and off camera.

2. Putting the Learning to work: I spent a good deal of time this summer formally re-educating myself on the mechanics of creative, specifically through Apple's Certified Professional program. I thought I knew a lot - and I did - but I had no idea how much I didn't know before I started taking these classes. The best part is that now, I'm hooked. I'll never let 12 months go by again, let alone a week, without making sure I'm learning something, either formally or informally. Having invested the time makes my work better, richer, and more rewarding, and that's a trend I'm looking to continue in the new year.

Sustainability, Recycling Footage, and YouTube Annotations

One of the frustrating aspects of my job is that I often walk away from a series of interviews with HOURS of good material. People who are passionate, knowledgable, and know how to speak intelligently about their area of expertise are what make my job fun and easy. I always feel as if I'm betraying them a bit by having to cut their thoughtful comments down to sound bites, and that our conversation together is somewhat wasted if I can't publish it to the world.

Last week I did a piece that had great interviews but the total amount of material was far too much for a showcase piece, so I tried YouTube's new "Annotations" feature to link from within our showcase news piece to the more in-depth interviews from the guests. My yield, as it were, went up from 4 minutes of video to about 25 minutes of really good material, and it is, in a sense, self-editing. If you're interested in learning more, great. If not, it doesn't get forced on you or take away from the snappy promo. 

This is going to be a fantastic feature for the kind of work I do at the University – I'll be interested in seeing what other assuredly more creative ways YouTube producers put it to work. For now, here's the finished piece - feel free to interact!

  
Click Here to Watch in Higher Quality.

Voyage of Discovery

Above is a video I did last week of a team-building exercise for incoming students at the Darden School. The "Lewis and Clark Voyage of Discovery" gave me the opportunity to reflect on my own recent Voyage of Discovery, where I've been taking classes at the Washington D.C. location of Future Media Concepts with the goal of earning my Final Cut Studio (FCS) Master Pro certification.

I had initially embarked on this course of study as a way to forward my career and, lets be honest, earning potential doing something I really loved. Over the years I've worked as a writer, musician, producer, marketing manager, e-commerce strategist, sound engineer... a lot of different jobs. None of them were as fun or more of a seemingly "natural fit" for me as the creative work of being a music editor, way back in the day. It didn't pay much but many years later I still look back on it as one of the happier times, professionally, in my life. Later, there was a brief, glimmering moment in my life in video where all was creative, a natural extension of my experience as a music editor... and then all of a sudden it seems I was told I was "The Producer" and life hasn't been as much fun since.

So it was with that thinking that I went back to school this summer. Ostensibly, the goal was to achieve a certification that would provide greater breadth of professional opportunities. I really thought there wasn't a whole lot for me to learn in editing video or audio, and I couldn't care less about graphics, because I'll always want to hire pros for that anyway. Whoo boy, I couldn't have been more wrong.

I'm about half-way through this course of study, and as with all things in education, the most important thing I'm learning is how much I Did Not Know prior to the outset. What I'm learning about technique and workflow makes me cringe at the way I worked just a few months ago, and I'm finding that with my new set of tools I don't get in my own way anymore. I have a vision, I create it. If it doesn't work out, I start over and try something else. With my new tools I don't spend any more time saying to myself "with all the effort I just put into that, do I really want to undo it and try another way? Isn't that Good Enough? Most importantly, I'm noticing a visible improvement in my work over just the past few months.

Of course, if you're familiar with the FCS suite you'll recognize a lot of template media in the above piece, and you know what? That's just fine with me, because a month ago I wouldn't have ventured that far. And for the next project, I'll do more and be braver. And on and on.

All this, and I'm only half-way through. Can't wait to see what lies at the end, or beyond it.

Hate that Microphone

BUT.. I had a lot of fun riding the electric bicycle. Was amazed we were able to get any usable audio at all given the blaring PA. You'll see my hand making a cameo - holding the mic not quite off camera while I conducted the interviews.

And a big shout out to Apple Motion - although I've not yet done the graphics certification (two weeks away!) creating the lower thirds clocked in at about two minutes of fiddling with the options, even made from scratch.



I did this music just a few weeks ago as an instrumentation test for something else I'm working on. It's nice when all these pieces just come together, right on the laptop ;-)

YouTube Header Ache...

I've been trying to stay away and/or get out of web design as much as possible over the past few years, but every now and then something needs to be done and it's just easier to do it yourself. The real lesson here: When in doubt, View Source.

As we've been working on setting up Darden's YouTube Channel (complete with unrestricted file durations and all the other great things that come with having an Enhanced Channel)I decided that while we wait on the content encoding it would be a good idea to get the look of the channel up-to-date. This doesn't take a great deal of work, just adjusting the color scheme to match our main website and getting the few graphic options one is given (hey - simple is good) created and uploaded.

If you have a YouTube "Enhanced Channel", one of the privileged options you receive are what they call "Branding Options", under Channel Design. within these branding options, there are three additional ways you can complement your channel design: using a Video Page Banner, a Video Page Icon, or a Channel Banner.

As of today, the Channel Banner upload dialog advises as follows:

Upload a thin banner that will display at the top of your Channel page (maximum 850px by 75px).

So I took a logo that looked like this, with the above following specs:



and the resulting image on the YouTube Channel did this:



As mentioned above, I've been trying to get away from web design ever since the late 90's, so I didn't jump through a lot of hoops trying to figure this out. I did what I do best, which is to find someone with the answer, and this is what I got:

"The YouTube page is embedding it at 875 pixels wide while the image is only 850 pixels. Did they say to make it 850 or 875 wide?"

So, I adjusted the canvas size of the image and voilà, as they say.

This is not a gripe about YouTube - Obie has been wonderful at cultivating and managing educational channels on YouTube and I'm going to pass this along to him so they can make the fix, but I know someone like me is out there Googling this right now...

Bethlehem Steel

A few images (pulled from video in my room at the historic Hotel Bethlehem, pardon the resolution) from this week's doc shoot at Bethlehem Steel, perhaps one of the most amazing feats of human engineering I've ever experienced. It's not every day you get to wear a hard-hat to work; thanks Charlie! (and thanks to the Smiththsonian's National Museum of Industrial History for the tour).

Hoos TV

I haven't placed much of my broadcast work on this blog. This summer I had the opportunity to co-direct (with UVA's Rob Smith) a few new image spots for The University. If you're watching any UVA Football or Basketball this year, you'll be seeing these.

Go Hoos!

UVA Faculty:


UVA Students:

It's on: Innovation Challenge 2007

click above to watch the video
Chic Thompson was in the studio to shoot this video invitation to the 2007 Innovation Challenge, final rounds to be held at Darden in November of 2007. I had covered this event doc-style last year and was looking forward to doing some fun (and useful) work with that footage in anticipation of the upcoming event. Some of that work appears here, but more of it (with context) will be coming out soon in a series of video podcasts we put together to help teams sharpen their skills in brainstorming and presentation.

What was fun about this piece was the idea I stole for the backdrop. Yep, I said it, and freely admit, that this was an instance of Picasso's axiom "Good artists copy. Great artists steal." I've been watching a lot of Sundance Channel's "The Green" and loved these talking head shots:




The wide, "behind the scenes" shot used in the same piece revealed that this wasn't a chroma setup, but simply a projector sitting on the floor hitting a white paper background. Since we had zero time for post on our Innovation Challenge piece, we had to pull off everything in-camera and this seemed a great way to do it.

This idea, thanks to the fact that we had a great PhotoShop artist on staff at the time, took just an hour or so to set up (with appropriate time given to tweak the lighting for the talent) and I couldn't be more pleased with the result. The funny thing is, if this had been suggested to me verbally, I would have dismissed the idea immediately - a way of thinking I try to avoid, but we all have our personal traps, especially when it comes to creative. Anyway, in the upcoming Video Podcasts you'll learn how to avoid that trap, and many others.

Victoria's background plate, for the record, was this:



And again, for comparison:



It's amazing how the background shifted blue in the shot - but it was another fortunate, "just go with it" thing - the kind of thing it helps to stay open to!

The Panic of 1907

Shot in the Studio at Darden, we went for the "Movie Junket" look - a decision arrived at as soon as the poster arrived ;-)It was a real treat to read a book over the weekend and then have the opportunity to sit and pick the author's brain on-camera.

(by the way, the book is a great read - check it out here)

Rewarding

It's nice to get an award, especially when you didn't know the work had been submitted. The Darden BusinessCast has received a Gold Hermes in the Podcast category!

Congrats to Ken and the rest of the crew I've worked with on this show over the last year. If you want some behind the scenes info on the show, don't miss the Case Study we did on it a few months ago.

Mad (Money) Jib Shot

Every now and then you need to get out of the studio. Kinda.



Good friend Victoria gaf-taped a mini-DV cam to the jib just prior to a rehearsal. The Director and I (unwittingly, if not handsomely) show off our thinning hair in the foreground of the first audience sweep. Doug, Jib op and owner of Bird's Eye Crane and Victoria are the first voices you hear. Doug did a brilliant job during the show.

Mad Time Lapse

click here for the higher quality WMV video.

Case Study published on FeedBurner

The FeedBurner Case Study is up! My thanks to Jessica at FeedBurner who put in a lot of effort to make this happen.

A little dryer than I would tend to make a podcast, I think this one gives some good info on how a podcast can help an organization reach the market in a win-win kind of way. Ken White of the Darden School also gives a great interview on some simple things you can do to push through a new marketing initiative like blogging, podcasting, etc.

Again, big ups to FeedBurner. If you're not using them, check out their site to see what they can do for your feed. it's pretty amazing stuff.

Maybe we should do more of these?

Listen Here.

and for all of our friends and family in Chicago - Go Bears!

Case Study: Darden BusinessCast

Another Draft for the upcoming Feedburner case study - what was interesting to me about this is how the creative team of a large institution can put "boutique" services like Feedburner (although Feedburner certainly offers enterprise-class services as well) to help them work around the red tape so often present in a large organization. I also just wrapped a great interview that will be included in this podcast - we'll let you know when it's posted. Here's the script so far:

So what if you work in a large institution, you've got the go-ahead on a podcasting initiative, and your IT department is handling the considerable effort of maintaing the back-end support services? I also spoke to some of the folks who produce the Darden School's Business Cast, and found some not-too surprising challenges.

Given the show's success as a key part of the school's communications strategy it's not surprising to find that the program receives input and support from resources throughout the school, not the least of which comes from the IT department who acts as the web host for the audio files. However if you've ever worked with an IT department in a large institution you surely know and likely understand that access to webserver details and statistics are heavily guarded by permissions and security settings, and for good reasons. On of the initial problems the creative team at the Darden school ran into was getting meaningful statistics on the show.


While they were working with the web team to figure out a way to get the on-demand statistical feedback they were also investigating Feedburner as an option to solve the problem of browser-unfriendly RSS files. After burning their feed to solve this problem they pleasantly discovered that their feedburner account was supplying them the stats they had been seeking, and they could get full accounts of show activity without having to trouble the IT Staff. The Darden creative team also enabled email-subscription to their feed and are able to see who amongst their various constituencies is subscribing to the show.