Filed under: Commercials, Corporate Video, Motion Graphics, Video Production | Tags: commercials, london, montage, showreel, Video Production
Our latest showreel featuring work for New Look, eBay, Bosch, easyJet, Telegraph, Metro, Reckitt Benckiser & Unilever. We hope you enjoy it!
Not so long ago web video was a small industry, where you needed a truckload of bandwidth to even think about watching a tiny, low-resolution clip of a cat falling off a skateboard or a kid riding his bike off a cliff. Along came youtube in 2005…yes, that’s right, just five years ago, and suddenly an explosion of web video was imminent.
Widespread broadband, and even wider-spread enthusiasm from a new generation of people who have never known a world without the internet, and you have a recipe for the death of TV. But all this online stuff is still just getting going. Among the fog of videos of cats, kids, puppies and *insert cute/clumsy/dangerous/fast/slow/big animal/human here* a new dawn of web video is peeping over the horizon.
Brands are now beginning to jump head first into the web video world, even going as far as making big-budget commercials that never actually make it to TV. Recent campaigns for Old Spice and Nike demonstrate that video on the web has grown up.
Agencies are also finally taking all this very seriously, with words like ‘digital’ and ‘social’ being mentioned earlier in the creative meetings than ‘tv spots’. The question that has been on everyone’s minds in agencies across the land is how long before web (or digital as it has now been labelled) sits atop the advertising tree.
Digital spend on advertising now exceeds television spend in most developed economies, with 23.5% of all advertising money in the UK spent on digital compared with just 21.9% on TV. This must lead to the inevitable conclusion that television will eventually die out as a form of entertainment as advertisers abandon it in favour of digital. This shift in money can only render TV broadcasters the penniless poor relation of Google, Facebook et al, and completely unable to spend money on actually producing the TV shows – you know, the bits between the adverts.
This may well turn out to be some sort of abstract doomsday scenario for the future of television, but major commercial TV broadcasters should be clamouring to push their digital credentials towards the big brands who currently still advertise on TV. Attracting major digital commercial deals with big brands must be the new aim, as it is these brands who will eventually find the concept of TV advertising clumsy and expensive compared to the relatively inexpensive, efficient and interactive world of youtube, Facebook and Twitter.
Maybe television in it’s current form will die out and be forced to merge with the internet somehow. It has certainly been a long-held prediction of many a forward thinker in this industry, but yet still television continues, and most of us still go home and switch on the TV in the evening.
What will be the tipping point that means we all throw our televisions in the trash and all gather round the computer instead? Which of the major players will be the first to launch a truly revolutionary device that completely replaces television altogether? The strange thing is that all of the likely candidates for developing such a product are all from different areas of the marketplace. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Samsung, Nokia… they all have the potential to takeover TV, but it somehow seems unlikely that it will be an actual TV broadcaster who takes the initiative.
With the recent news that Youtube now has TV shows on it, and the ever converging broadcast and online media, the next step surely is Google’s move into television broadcasting. Surely it is only a matter of time before you can switch on your TV and the first thing you see will be a Google search screen, where you simply type in the show you want, and up pops 1,436,000 shows that meet your search criteria.
This is all very well, and it is certainly progress, but with the several hundred digital channels already available, will the transition to potentially millions of channels spell the end for high-quality programming? Experts have been saying for years that with so many more channels, the quality has to go down, but it could be argued that we haven’t seen any dramatic drop in programme quality over the last few years, it’s just that we’ve had to sift through a lot more rubbish on the way to finding what we want to watch. It seems almost inevitable that this amount of poor programming will just continue to increase exponentially, as we have more and more choice available.
The concept of Youtube since the very beginning was that everyone with access to a video camera (which let’s face it means everyone with access to a phone) would be able to broadcast themselves. How long before that freedom to broadcast is extended to our TV screens? Within the next year or two I suspect.
For brands in particular this is an exciting time. Television advertising space is cheaper than ever, and there are so many more options to advertise to specific markets on specific channels at specific times of the day. With Search TV as I like to call it, brands will be able to have their ad displayed before a programme which has been searched for on Google seconds before. The viewer wants to watch a show about cooking their favourite food for example, so types ‘thai cookery show’ into their Google TV (using their Google Remote of course), and seconds later, they have found thousands of shows that they might want to watch, and each one is sponsored by a different food or drink brand specific to their search term.
The potential for revenue for whoever controls the search part of this process is massive, and whatever you think will happen in this mass convergence of television, internet, advertising, phones and video, you have to admit that Google, yet again, seems to be the one holding all the cards.
Filed under: Corporate Video, Video Production | Tags: filming, london, Video Production
Our latest work for our good friends over at London Business School can be found here: LBS video production
Filmed over several days at London Business School, this video shows off the experience of being on the ‘Emerging Leaders Programme’ from a students perspective. Potential new recruits can see from the video what it is like to be on the course, and as such it works like a living prospectus for the school itself. Whilst we knew that a lot of detail had to go into the film, we were able to keep it engaging using a fast editing pace and an upbeat soundtrack.
Filed under: Video Production | Tags: budgets, opinion, Video Production
I read this article the other day and thought it was spot on, so here are my thoughts on it.
So here I am again, being asked to come up with a cost for a video where the variables are so wide, the parameters of production so great that the cost could literally fluctuate by 500% in either direction. The reason this is a dilemma? Because the new client has said that they “don’t have a budget in mind, so just quote whatever you think it will cost”.
Now this presents us with a problem. Do we quote low in the hope that we will be the cheapest and get the job based on that? Umm…doesn’t sound like we’d be offering the best work. Do we go in high with the aim of throwing everything under the sun at the project to produce the most amazing video ever seen? Hmm…but they definitely won’t have the budget for that… So what are we to do I hear you cry?
Well, the ideal situation when being asked to quote for a job is for the client to disclose their budget straight away so that we can all avoid these mind games. It is in everyone’s interest to approach a job in this way, because then the client gets a solution to their video production problem that will be the best they can get for the budget they have…and believe me, they WILL have a budget, of course they will. How else do you explain the answer that all too commonly comes back in the face of a quote; “oh, that is over our budget I’m afraid” …oh, so you DID have a budget all along.
These difficulties with budgeting never seem to crop up with timescales. They always know when they want the video finished by. Very rarely do they say “we don’t have a deadline, just tell us how long you think it will take”.
Now, unlikely at it may seem, I can see this from the clients point of view. If they don’t give you their budget up front, then in their eyes, they will get a load of completely different quotes from production companies, and can therefore simply go with the one that is the cheapest, thereby saving them money. Ah, but that is the problem, if something as creative and individual as video production was to be decided on cost alone, then we would all disappear down a spiraling mire of diminishing returns, with every company bidding to be the cheapest and the quality going down at the same rate. Now, clients very rarely decide on a production company on price alone. Creativity, experience, skill, friendliness…these all play a significant part as well.
So…. now we will requote based on the budget that we now know they have, which means producing a video to a level that will suit them. We will develop a video that works hard for their budget and one that will be the very best it could be for the money they have to spend. Problem is, we have all just wasted a week going round in circles to get to the point where we are quoting at the right level for the client’s budget.
What then, is our conclusion. That ultimately we could all have saved ourselves a great deal of time if we were all open about budgets cost and time from the start.
The proof that this is the best way forward is that in our experience, and from all the work we do, the best work and the work which gets done in the most efficient and creative manner, is for clients who have come to us with a budget, a timescale, and a rough idea of what they want. Everyone knows where they are, and the client gets the video they want, for not a penny more than they wanted to spend.
Filed under: Video Production | Tags: scorch london, video production company
On here we will be putting industry updates, stuff about what we’ve been up to, and also some opinions of ours, which are valid, and very important we’ll have you know