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#221 Lessons from Camp: Transcript

By Paul, on August 4th, 2011%

WordCamp Boston took place this past weekend and based on my experience from last year, I was looking forward to it.

In 2010 I was just beginning to explore WordPress as a platform for publishing this podcast, as well as extending my voice into other media such as blogging and screencasting. There were only two tracks last year, one for coders and one for beginners. I was in beginners and the one day event was an exhaustive introduction to setting up and using a WordPress site. As a result, I felt confident enough to transfer 4 years worth of audio content from Blogger to WordPress. if you’re facing a similar challenge, let me put your mind at ease; it’s easy.

Transferring the show notes and links was as simple as loading a plug-in (in itself pretty simple) and pressing a button. All the posts transferred successfully and in proper order. All that remained was loading the Bluberry PowerPress plug-in for audio and video and then connecting 200 or so audio files to the mp3 player it created on the page of each post. Time consuming yes, but not complicated.

While WordCamp Boston 2010 focused on the ballpark view of WordPress (at least the beginner sessions did) I knew this year’s event would be different. Partly due to the organizing committee having gained a wealth of experience and attendee feedback to guide them. But I hadn’t stood still either. I was no longer a blank slate regarding WordPress. I had goals to achieve, specific things to learn.

This year there were three tracks with 8 sessions each. on Saturday and another 6 each on Sunday. I spent most of my time in the beginner category, although I did dip my foot in a couple development sessions. They were all very intense sessions. Towards the end of the day I had to take a break because my brain was saturated with information.

However, after a cold drink and some mindless web surfing I was able to return for the last two beginner sessions about Marketing for bloggers.

Now, talking about marketing at unconferences can generate a lot of mixed reactions. It’s an unintended consequence of the best intentions gone awry. Generally unconferences came out of the simple desire of people with like interests, usually focused on technical skills, to meet and learn from each other in a safe, encouraging environment.

Marketing, extending the brand, identifying the ROI and business model, these are not the first things you think of when you’re talking about programming or story telling but it is a natural part of any form of communication. It has a symbiotic relationship with content creation. Absolutely necessary, but also something most people think of as completely separate.

The whole point of a camp, whether it’s bar camp, podcamp or wordcamp is to make learning fun. That’s what I think about when someone mentions camp. Maybe some of that fun it work, but it’s fun work. Trying to figure out how to turn your camp craft project into a business, that’s not fun, unless you go to business camp. So, when I hear someone talk about monetizing my podcast or channelizing my listeners so I can make a business case for sponsor investment, I think, not fun and even kill joy.

But social media like podcasts or blogs are not merely about creating a key ring for your mother, it’s a communication platform and that requires listeners, people who don’t know you from squat, but who choose to listen or read what you have to say. And who stick around for the duration and tell other people to visit your site and become subscribers. That’s work, plain and simple

Of course, you can integrate this work into your production process if you take the time, sort of like thinking about the edit while you shoot with the camera, but most people typically would prefer not to give up time dedicated to their craft to think about marketing.

That said, I want to be fair, properly promoting your work is a powerful skill that requires attention to detail and a tremendous amount of insight in order to produce successful results. It’s like the shine on an apple. If you had to polish as many fresh picked apples as I had to as a boy scout for Apple Day you would respect the value that a good shine adds to an apple.

Anyway, back to the marketing conundrum:
• the need to promote your work
• and the resistance to make the time

If you have the money you can pay someone to handle the PR, brand identity, market positioning, but in a world where everyone is their own brand, we all have to know how to be a marketer to some extent. Still, there’s no escaping the fact that time spent showing the wares, whether it’s a website, investor calls or making presentations is less time honing my craft and getting “important” things done.

I think that’s a common feeling among people who attend these events. LIke, who let these people in here. They aren’t making anything!

Certainly that’s a common response, reject the value of marketing out of hand and look inward. But while I wish it weren’t necessary, marketing skills and brand awareness are as important as anything else you do as a creative individual.

And it’s not like we aren’t already doing it all the time anyway, in small bits, putting ourselves out there, promoting ourselves, talking with a “hey!, look at me” smile on our faces.

So to return to WordCamp, it’s been a long day full of information binging, it’s like an oven outside. The session rooms have varying degrees of comfort, from chilly air conditioning to stifling heat and after half an hour break I sit down to two back to back sessions about marketing.

And they couldn’t be more different. The woman presenting in the first session came out of the gate like a firestorm leaving behind the audience in her charred wake. She was energized, confident, prepared and focused to talk about how to maximize your audience potential. The problem, for me at least, was that she was focused on the topic and not the audience. I felt like I was in the way of her reaching the end of her presentation. She had lots of information to present but I quickly lost interest because I was so struck by her style. She would make a perfunctory nod to the audience from time to time, asking if they were getting it, or had any questions, but really, the implication was don’t break my stride, I’m going somewhere with this.

Midway through I made a twitter comment, “Are there any unconferences for marketers”? I was thinking her message feels like it was prepared for an audience of her peers.

There was no give and take between her and the audience. I wondered whether she ever had even been to an unconference before. In a nutshell her presentation didn’t connect with the audience, she was talking at people.

And I don’t want to sound like I’m hammering her for being a bad presenter. She was a good presenter, as I said before, alert, focused, dynamic, appearing to engage, but all the same disconnected from the audience. She wasn’t reaching out, she was handing something down. It’s an example of style trumping content and it’s a good example of the separation between content creation and sales/marketing. It may have wowed them somewhere else, but not me, not there.

And then there was the second marketing session, and man, what a difference!

Lots of information again, but different in lots of ways. Quite unlike the previous speaker:

•    There was space between his various points so you could digest what he had to say
•    His arguments were constructed in order to build an information ladder we could all climb
•    He clearly defined how the content and the marketing goals fit together
•    He engaged with the audience, including taking questions during the presentation
•    While he presented a great deal of information, he kept the scale of actionable items down to a doable level that reflected the knowledge and skills of the audience
•    And he kept getting back to the point that all these marketing tasks served the audience’s primary goal, which was the success of their WordPress blog.

As I said, Marketing and sales are complex and subtle practices that are alien to most people and there is no reinforcement of this skill in our daily life. Oh yeah, we all consume marketing, but most of us don’t produce it. So we don’t have the ability to take apart and reassemble the required elements for promotional success.

Ultimately, these two experiences, back to back, demonstrated to me that I can be as quick as anyone to dismiss the value of marketing information, while at the same time made me realize how important it is. I also recognized the difference style, presentation and knowing your audience can have in getting your message across. It was almost like a marketing seminar inside a marketing seminar.

You need a marketing strategy for your media production. It needs to be integrated into your production workflow. You need to do it or you need someone who works with you to do it. Either way, your business is going nowhere without it. It’s the wheels for your communication engine.

There are a lot of marketing tools that are available at little or no cost, but don’t over-look the hidden cost which is how much time and effort you need put into it to make it run.

What works for you? I’d be interested in knowing how you’ve used social media to bring attention to your projects.

A blog can be a marketing engine. If you take care to record every step of your production from concept to delivery, when you’re done all you have to do is plug it in.

As a filmmaker and producer, examples of promotional tools include:
•    blogging
⁃    a blog and or website is critical as a platform for anything you create such as
•    video posts in the form of a journal or “making of”
•    audio interviews with production team members and actors
⁃    (recording and editing audio is more cost efficient than video)
•    production stills, including off-camera, candid images
•    a film diary
•    Social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube that point the audience back to the main site

Digital media technology is both a boon and a curse to content creators. On the one hand it broadens the horizon of our opportunities, while on the other, it requires that we stretch ourselves.

The technology that serves us also taunts into doing more because the tools are next to free and they brings so many new possibilities within our reach. All we need to do is add water, which is really our own sweat, and voila, it’s done. But it also pushes us in directions we don’t want to go, forcing us to embrace skills and attitudes we don’t think are worthwhile or at best distract us from our bliss.

Look at Designers. Nowadays desktop publishing has required they learn how to be typesetters, among other things,
and Artists now have to curate their own web galleries
Filmmakers have to be gaffer, DP, editor, color graders and more.

All in the pursuit of their passion.

And on top of it all, everyone of us has to sell our work and by extension, ourselves.

Do you think I am being too harsh here? Am I making something that’s quite simple over complicated? Maybe I haven’t read the manual, so no wonder I’m tripping over these roles.

If you’d like, you can help me fill in the gaps. Let me know what you think, or do.

Send a comment to the blog, videostudentguy.com, or email me if you’d like, at videostudentguy@gmail.com. I would love to hear from you.

All this time talking and I haven’t told you very much about what I saw or leaned from the sessions that I sat in on at WordCamp. I plan to put out a blog a few days after I put this online where I can list the sessions I attended, add a brief commentary for each and provide links to the presenter’s slides.

The kind people who put on WordCamp Boston 2011 have videotaped every session and I will be posting links to those when they’re available.

There is a lot of good information in the presentations I couldn’t attend and I’m looking forward to watching them myself.

I’m Paul, the videostudentguy,

I’ll talk to you later,

Bye.

#221 Lessons from Camp

By Paul, on August 2nd, 2011%

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

I attended WordCamp Boston a week ago and learned a lot. Not only technical information or personal updates from friends, but some insight into my own prejudices and goals.

The reason why I, an aspiring filmmaker/video producer, attend an unconference about the WordPress platform is to gain some understanding and maybe even control over a flexible web platform for presenting and promoting myself and my creations. In this case I got that, but also an unexpected lesson about marketing.

#212 Blink – Transcript

By Paul, on March 30th, 2011%

Your brain is holding out on you

I just finished Blink by Malcom Gladwell and it’s a fascinating read that I strongly recommend. In it Gladwell discusses the ability that all people have to unconsciously evaluate a difficult a situation or a puzzling phenomenon in a split second. You can argue whether it’s the result of some evolutionary response, but the critical factor is that we all possess this skill and most of us are unconscious of how it operates in our lives.

It’s the skill that allows a museum curator to recognize an art forgery, without being able to say why, or a policeman to know if someone is dangerous or even give a tennis instructor the ability to know, with certainty, that a player, any player, is about to double fault on their serve. All without really knowing why.

A sixth sense? Intuition? Precognition?

No. It’s our innate ability to focus on subtle variations of body language and in particular the changes that play across the surface of the face. This ability can isolate the differences between anger, disgust, fear, etc, in the blink of an eye. Ask anyone who was bullied or abused as a child and they will confirm that you can consciously identify the telltale signs of someone’s mood and predict their actions. I think anyone could quickly tell you that if they saw a six foot four man walking toward you down a dark street they could quickly identify whether they were menacing or not.

Or could they? You have to pay very close attention to a variety of very subtle signs to understand what you’re seeing. Even so, the dark side of this instinctual sensitivity is that it fails if we are in a state of fear or hyper alertness, where our hearts are beating very fast, like 170 beats per minute and the adrenaline is flooding our minds.

And there’s more. Prejudices can alter or even hijack these perceptions without our knowing. Take the example near the end of the book which describes a woman musician performing a blind audition for the Munich orchestra in 1980. Women in orchestras at that time were rare and the “men’s club” mentality of this field was quite rigid. But she performed brilliantly and following her audition all other candidates were sent home, so confident were the judges of the quality of the unknown auditioner.

However, once they found out she was a woman they were aghast. They just couldn’t be believe a woman could play as well as a man. And though they didn’t remove her from contention, after all they they themselves were trained musicians, confident in their own ears ability to determine the character and quality of another performer, they continued to test and denigrate her skills, reduce her status and remove her from the orchestra.

The reason that they couldn’t trust their ears to tell them what they already believed is that blind auditions were rare; most auditions were face to face and in all those auditions, judges had projected their prejudices on to each performance and they “saw” that the women sounded inferior to the men. Undoubtedly they also saw that the men “sounded” better that the women.

After 15 years the woman prevailed and undeniably demonstrated her qualification to be first trombonist of the symphony. Obviously her qualities went far beyond the ability to play a trombone.

There are two things that I drew from reading this book ,though I don’t doubt there’s a lot more to learn on a second reading.

First, we don’t usually know why we can understand some things based on a single glance. Our conscious is a locked door and while we can learn to trust these insights, we can’t know how we know, nor consciously replicate it.

I take that to mean we don’t know what we’re thinking. We can choose to trust these instincts, which are after all, the result of millions of years of instinctual responses to life threatening circumstances. Meant to move us to action without thinking, or afterthought. Or not.

Second,
We can understand it if we work at it. Maybe it’s only a matter of seeing a pattern of actions repeated over and over again until we trust them. Or maybe it’s more complicated, requiring you to keep meticulous records so you that you can qualify subtle patterns in the body or the face and then make distinction between sets of patterns and their differing results. A list becomes a spreadsheet, then a database.

You know that TV show, Lie to Me, where a guy is able to tell by looking at someone if they’re lying? Well, that’s based on real science. Researchers have mapped the muscles of the face and can tell what you’re really thinking through the involuntary muscle movements on your face (movements that cannot be triggered consciously (they say). And the computer models are so sophisticated that they can track not only the meaning between one muscle movement and another, such as the crinkling of the nose or raising of an eyebrow, but the significance between sets of three, four and even five different muscles. I believe the author wrote that these scientists have mapped up to 40,000 pattern variations.

So if they can do it, you can do it.

The first point is that we come by this ability unconsciously and we don’t control it, or understand it.
And Second, we can bring some of these perceptions into our conscious lives and make use of them

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Just as Carl Yung said that everyone in your dream is you, and the aliens in every science fiction story are really about humanity (Jung didn’t say that last bit about aliens, by the way), every story and every video story is about people and everything we share in common. Hopes, dreams, fears, joys etc. Even if there are no people in the movie.

So as visual story tellers we need to develop this 6th sense. In Blink, Gladwell refers to the ability to identify subtle, but powerful changes in the face and body as time slicing. At the beginning of the book he presents this concept with a researcher who videotaped 15 minutes of newly married couples and combed through them one frame at a time. He identified over a dozen facial and body movements that represented the gamut of emotions that occur within any relationship. And these were videotapes of casual innocuous discussions that on the surface didn’t appear to possess any emotional depth. But observed at the frame level, 1/30th of a second, he was able to accurately predict the likelihood of a couple being married for the remainder of their lives, or splitting up in the next few years.

Time slicing is something video editors are already familiar with. Knowing where, and when to cut in the action is a critical skill every editor needs to master in order to tell a good story well. But it’s not the surface story alone that leads the audience, it’s all those intangible nuances that a good actor can deliver which floats around in the audience’s mind long after the performance is over.

Don’t forget that most people don’t have a conscious awareness of this experience. For most people, it will present itself as vague feeling, over time. But it can be used to control the direction, or redirection of the audience’s attention, IF the editor is aware of and able to apply it judiciously for the benefit of the story.

That is a powerful sword to wield, to present on film an experience that is as rich and textured as a 15 minute unselfconscious conversation between two friends, so that the memory lingers, continually resolving itself for days, years, maybe a lifetime.

That’s the what. The how is much simpler to explain.

How do you develop this skill? Look at people’s faces and do the work. Cut the video. Cut a lot of video and tell a lot of stories.

Look at the faces in your films, that’s where the story is.

Repetition and Focus. And your own inspiration

And that’s it for this show.

Check out the book, Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. There’s a link to the book on Amazon in the show notes and a link to excerpts as well.

I won’t pretend it isn’t dense. I listened to it as an audio book and I found that in that form it was very easy to absorb.

This is Paul, the Video StudentGuy,

I’ll talk to you later

Bye.

#212 Blink – Book review and editing advice

By Paul, on March 29th, 2011%

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Your mind is holding out on you

In this episode I offer a brief review of Malcolm Gladwell‘s book, Blink. It’s an absorbing read, or listen in my case, that attempts to dispel the mystery behind the intuitive leaps we all make based on a single glance.

There are lessons to be learned in here that would benefit any visual storyteller, if you look carefully.

#205 Richard Harrington – From Still to Motion

By Paul, on December 28th, 2010%

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

I saw Richard Harrington of RHED Pixel at a BosFCPUG meetup last month. Here was there to talk about producing digital video using DSLRs like Canon’s 5D Mark II, 7D or Rebel T2i. That’s the subject of a new book he coauthored,

From Still to Motion:
A photographer’s guide to creating video with your DSLR.

For 45 minutes he plowed through a tremendous amount of information that seemed to be everything you could cover on the top, in short form. Looking at the TOC of the book online I see there’s even more. If you’re interested and I think it’s a great book on the subject, very down to earth and pragmatic, click on the title above and download a free chapter and find out what it’s about.

Here’s my outline of the things he covered and what the book has to offer.

Advantages of using DSLR for video

Depth of field
•   great of focusing audience attention, don’t overuse it
Quality of filmic image
•   great for interviews, not action scenes
Smaller profile
•   easier to get tight shots, extreme angles
Lens selecting
•   rent/buy older primes with manual aperture
Lowlight performance
•   good right out of the box
Tapeless workflow
•   memory cards are cheap, use them to hold source media
Native Editing
•   Avid MC5, Sony Vegas, Premiere, avoid transcoding
Shoot for the edit
•   Don’t shoot everything, you don’t need all that footage

Cons

Lot’sa them
• nothing new here, I took a nap
• visit ReelSEO for overcoming limitations of DSLRs

Tech essentials

multi frame sizes
•   24 frames per second is the universal master frame rate
Sensors
•   megapixels are not the issue, buy a camera that feels good in your hand
The Gear You’ll Need
•   if you use it like a video camera accessorize like a video camera
•   tripod, viewfinder, external monitor, matt box and batteries

Preproduction

Storyboard
•   shoot images with same camera and lenses as video shoot
Gear to bring on site surveys
iPhone
•   Lots of apps for filmmakers
•   GPS, storyboard creator, Sun locator, slate, weather

Production

Recording formats
•   H.264 – avoid photo JPG
Recording length limitations
•   plan breaks – stagger camera card changes
Storage
•   purchase based on how fast, reliable and cost per gigabyte
Monitoring
•   absolutely use an external monitor, it’s essential for focus
Audio
•   built in audio is for reference only, use digital audio recorder and boom
Syncing Sound
•   PluralEyes – $150
Vary your position
•   avoid zoom, move the tripod
Exposure triangle
•   ISo Aperture, Shutter Speed – understand it

Post

Ingesting
•   clone, don’t copy to drive and use Adobe Bridge for meta data
Transcoding
•   save time, ingest select footage
Tapeless workflow
•   store media in two places two different mechanisms: a drive and something else
Choose right system for editing
•   lots of VRAM on a powerful video card
Resources
•   maximize the money you save with the DSRL through enhanced production value!!!

If you’re interested in learning more about these cameras and which ones suit your price range check out The Digital SLR Guide for an Overview of current models.

I already regret it

By Paul, on December 10th, 2010%

Looking for video related work on Academic Job Sites. I see the same jobs across the country. The same ones.

Instructional Technologists who combine development skills, statistical analysis, web design and static media.
Teaching positions with a focus on Broadcast and Film production.
Social Media jobs covering every conceivable form of online networking tool with no real knowledge of what is either effective, or even useful.

All of them producing media generated through backward looking imagination.

You can certainly justify your work by playing it safe and directing students towards yesterday’s jobs, but how satisfying is that for the students who are just graduating. Get a copy of Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Read the Saber-Tooth Curriculum.

It makes me wonder how long it’s going to take for academia to clue in to the use of video and audio and their interactive potential that doesn’t have chains connecting them to TV and Film. The plane is dropping and the passengers are putting on parachutes without realizing there’s water, not land below. What color is your inflatable raft?