NEW DOCUMENTARY RATED “R” FOR “REAL”
Texas Pictures recently completed a unique documentary about DWI that targets teens as the audience. It was created with the help of a team of high school students from all over the greater Houston area who served as Texas Pictures interns. The team participated in every phase of production to ensure the finished project was on target for an audience of their peers. Once in awhile we get to be a part of something that may actually saves lives. How cool is that?
The film features real-world footage of DWI arrests and processing, crash scenes, emergency room activity and interviews with victims, offenders, enforcement, prosecutors and others. It is gritty, it is graphic and it is a hit. The title is, Chronicles of a Teen Killer. It has been on YouTube for two months and already has over 6000 views. The documentary, along with links to media coverage about the project, can be found on our web site at http://www.texas-pictures.com/Chronicles.html.
Houston Mayor Annise Parker described the film as, “an educational documentary that I hope will be used for years to come to teach and influence other young people in making the right choices.” Dana Tyson with Sunny 99 said of the film, “everyone should see this.” Deborah Duncan with KHOU’s Great Day Houston said, “This is so important, so important.” Reporter Ned Hibbard with Fox26 News said, “It’s not pretty, it’s not politically correct… It is real.” Reporter Kevin Reece with Channel 11 News described the documentary as, “powerful stuff.”
We’ve received requests for the documentary on DVD from high schools as far away as Virginia, and at least one oilfield service company is integrating the documentary into their safety program. We’re now looking in to how this gritty, real-world format can be applied to other industrial safety messages for some of our clients. If you have a chance, check it out and share it with others.
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SOCIAL MEDIA TRENDS
An increasing number of our clients are now considering social media as an additional destination for many productions. This isn’t to say that destinations like YouTube and Facebook are having much impact on the style or content of the production, but clients are discovering that a presence on social media environments is becoming expected by their customers. Posting existing and new productions achieves that presence without any new expense, and productions can be modified for ideal results in social media for only a minimal expense.
YouTube is the second most used search engine on the internet and YouTube virtually always scores a first page hit in Google searches for anything. Social media isn’t going away. Does it offer any return on investment? Any return is significant since little or no investment is required to develop a presence. Also, if you listen to the arguments from ‘savvy’ business people against having a social media presence, they sound pretty much identical to the arguments similar business people made 15 years ago against having an internet presence. Remember those geniuses?
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FALL TRADE SHOWS APPROACHING
With the approach of the fall trade show season, we thought it might be useful to share our list of general production guidelines for video displays used at trade shows, kiosks, point-of-sale and similar applications once again.
Bullet text is better – Your audience is much more likely to read a concise line of text or two than to listen to any part of a spoken presentation in a trade show environment. A narration has to compete with fluctuating trade show noise levels, conversations and event announcements. It isn’t very realistic to think that the narration on a looping video in a trade show will receive any attention at all.
Create the video with no beginning or ending – Your audience will walk up and start watching the video at any time, so only a very small percentage will actually arrive at the beginning point of the loop. You’ll achieve better results without a distinct opening or conclusion.
Deliver a key message every 20 seconds or less – Your audience will only devote a short amount of time to your loop so the video should deliver an important message to the audience frequently. This ensures that viewers receive one or two messages before they move on.
Use strong, dynamic visuals and avoid a PowerPoint like format – Your audience has suffered through enough badly produced PowerPoint presentations to be likely to run screaming from any display that resembles the last presentation they had to sit through.
Use enough visual diversity to stay fresh – Don’t rely on one background for the entire presentation. The video should show your audience things and take them places they don’t usually get to see. Real video works much better than animated computer graphics. Anyone can get slick graphics; show them something competitors can’t.
The design of the graphics should complement the booth design – Make the video look like it actually belongs on the booth rather than an afterthought. Here are a couple of examples: The color scheme used as the background for text displays could use the booth colors. The fonts used for the text could match the fonts used in other parts of the booth.
Messages should focus on the audience’s interests – The video should deliver concise points about things that actually matter to the audience. The points should be brief, easy to understand and make clear what benefit you’re offering to the audience at a glance. Instead of saying something like, “Our new system will enable drillers to minimize downtime,” you could simply say, “REDUCE RIG DOWNTIME.” We all know a claim like that in an oil & gas environment will stop traffic.
Use sound effects before music – the repetition of looping music (and narration) becomes annoying to the folks working the booth much more quickly than sound effects. Booth workers will be less likely to turn down the volume on your display if you use whooshes, zips, zings and pops to reinforce movement within the video as a stronger element than the music bed.