EV Tips 003: Less Is More
When I look back at an old video that my company has produced, or when a customer shows us a copy of a competitor's video, the thing that makes the video look old and unpolished isn't the lack of resolution or the square image ratio. Far and away, it's the "special effects", the music, and the graphics.
Often times an editor copies their effects from modern styles that they see on TV shows (i.e. crazy MTV transitions from 1987). Well, you might as well stick a cabbage patch kids commercial right in the middle of your video too, because other than simple cuts and fades, special effects and transitions are a dead give-away to the time period of the production. On top of that, they are embedded in the final video forever. Thanks for nothing HD-Upconverting DVD player.
In the last couple of years, EVC has adopted the less is more theory, and we're living by it. The idea is this: customers don't buy your event video for the cheesy effects, royalty-free music, and fancy new modern fonts that you've emblazoned all over the production. They buy your video for three specific reasons. First, their child's event only happens once, and the parent would much rather see it with their own eyes than from behind the shaking lens of a Flip HD camera that can't zoom if it tried. Next, more often than not, the videographer has the best seat in the house. You get there hours before the event starts - probably before the doors open - and claim the angle that will make your production shine. Parents are busy with their kids, concession stands, and tickets, and before they can jockey for space they end up behind a pole with a less than optimal view of the action. Last, you probably have nicer equipment than the parents do, so chances are your raw footage will look better (If you don't, that's another issue). A bigger lens provides sharper images and better depth of field than a point-and-shoot camcorder will.
So once you've captured some great video, don't taint it with the effects of the day. Stick with timeless fonts and transitions, and preferably leave the video in it's purest form. Lots of rendering and encoding on your end may make their point-and-shoot a quality contender, and that isn't good for anyone. In event video, quality is more about capturing an event in the best possible resolution, from the best vantage point. Keep it simple, and 20 years from now your customers will appreciate it.
Riding in Style!
Ok, this has nothing to do with Event Video or business or anything important, but I just picked up a new Vespa LX150 and I can't wait to hit the desert roads with it! Ever since renting one in Nantucket a few years ago, I had been waiting for the moment when I could finally justify getting one of these. And now I'm proud to be getting 75mpg (take that Prius).
Free Video?
I've been reading Free, a book by Chris Anderson (@chr1sa), Editor In Chief of Wired Magazine, for what seems like 6 months now. And on my 2 hour and 50 minute flight from Phoenix to Indianapolis, I finally finished it. Not that the book was boring. It was actually very thought provoking, so much so that it caused my mind to wander every time I picked it up, thinking of new ideas and determining how Chris' research applies to EVC and to the Event Video industry.
In many ways, Free reaffirmed some of the things we've started to implement over the last couple of years, and I think everyone could benefit from skimming over the book, or at least reading the first and last two chapters. Main idea: In this book, free refers mostly to online businesses or electronic media, and the dozens of very unique & creative ways in which entrepreneurs are inventing business models around it. Online, free is inevitable. Every year technology gets faster and cheaper, so Anderson recommends rounding down - stop charging for services that you make less and less from each year, and start figuring out other ways to make money.
With EVC, we're using free to give away live streaming coverage of some of our productions (more each year), in order to increase awareness of the video, and hopefully drive sales. Over the next few years, we intend to offer more and more ways for our customers to purchase productions at varying price and quality levels (download, DVD, blu-ray), while keeping the most basic version (low-quality streaming) free. For many of our customers, the free product will satisfy their needs. But for some, the portability of a DVD, quality of a Blu-ray, or flexibility of a downloaded file are reason enough to spend the extra money - and those are the purchases that subsidize the entire operation.
Another way to implement Free is to make the product cost nothing to the end-user (the customer), but make a profit elsewhere. Some examples of this would be to bundle a DVD in the cost of registration for an event, place advertisements within the video to subsidize the cost of the production, or allow a company to sponsor the entire production, even going as far as to put their branding on the DVD packaging.
Today's Free isn't about tricking the customer. But it is a business model that you can't ignore. Assuming technology continues at its current pace, and video distribution continues to get cheaper, you might as well stay ahead of the curve.
Read: Fittingly, you can download Free, by Chris Anderson, for no charge here: link. Or you can buy it the old fashioned way.
EV Tips 002: Manage Expenses
A couple months ago, I went to a seminar featuring Scott Morrison, CPA and Financial Partner of Morrison & Associates in Chandler, AZ. Scott made a great point, and one that I think it's easy for small companies to forget. As our businesses grow, it's easy to keep adding expenses like more equipment, more people, more bandwidth, and more administrative overhead. But as we grow our companies, taking on more expenses as well as more revenue, it's easy to lose track of the proportions and find that despite creating a larger company, profits can shrink. Many event video companies fall victim to this - what starts as a small 1-2 person operation can quickly fall apart without tightly managed expenses and very organized systems. Think of it as a wagon rolling down a steep hill. It works just fine if you don't plan to go anywhere.
Scott also said that during a slow year, if a business shrinks, it should be able to stay just as profitable as it was last time it was that small just by eliminating the expenses that it added as it grew.
After the seminar I took a thorough look at every dollar going out of my company (I can't recommend this strongly enough). What I found were three things: First, there were some expenses that we could just plain eliminate. Things like automatic domain renewals, unused email accounts, and equipment that never sees the light of day. A few calls to vendors and an hour on Craigslist and eBay freed up some monthly cash flow, and brought in some extra cash from things that we don't need. If you can't sell something, my advice is to throw it out or donate it. The less useless stuff you have surrounding you, the better your business will run. Next, there were some monthly plans that we were able to upgrade or bundle in order to avoid overage charges - phone systems are the best example of this one. Crazy how 900 minutes on one plan costs more than 1,200 minutes on the next plan up. Last, I called vendors and asked for better deals. In the last month, we've reduced the cost of our supplies, our credit card processing, equipment financing, and credit card interest rates... just by asking.
Moving forward, I plan to do this every couple of months. Why not?