When I used to produce and production manage video, I’d hire hundreds of crew members and contract with dozens of vendors. Eventually I got to the point where I established relationships with certain crew and companies and they became my preferred production team. After ten years producing, I had a great set of resources to call on for each project. Unfortunately, there were two crew people who always came on board that I could never get rid of. They had odd names. One was called Somebody and the other was Someone. I never did meet them in person, but they were always around.
Once I looked out onto the set at wrap and saw the security guys were no longer around. I called over the 2nd Assistant Director who would normally know what was up. She informed me that Somebody told them they could leave early. I of course asked who, only to be told again, it was Somebody.
Another day the caterer was short ten meals for us. I know how many I had authorized on the call sheet so it was a mystery as to why we were short. Well, apparently Someone told the caterer the wrong head count.
These two trouble makers were responsible for many rumors also. Someone once told the crew they would be having a short day. Somebody, on another occasion told the crew we’d be working a 20 hour day.
It sure would have been nice to have web based collaboration tools like Market7 in those olden days of the 90’s. If we had such tools, the crew, the security guys and the caterer could all see the website for the production and would know that Somebody and Someone were wrong about almost everything said.
Video extraordinaire and guru Larry Kless did an in-depth interview with Market7 CEO Seth Kenvin, along with a great blog post to accompany it. Larry gets to the heart (& several other organs) of what Market7 is all about, and talks how and why the company got started, how Market7 addresses the very different manner in which teams must collaborate when producing video and the many different environments for which the video.Market7 software is built.
Check out the video below and head over to Larry’s blog to read more.
Market7 CEO Seth Kenvin (formerly a Red Herring editor & columnist for those not in the know!), picked up his quill to scribe about better video production collaboration with iMediaConnection’s audience of digital marketers. (btw, Seth is also picking up his old editor’s hatchet to rework this post a bit before publishing — way to get it started Brian!)
In the article, Seth discusses some terrific general purpose online collaboration tools and what’s missing when it comes to working on video from start to finish. Of course, for those of you experiencing the common pain points Seth mentions, we suggest giving Market7 a try for all your video collaboration needs!
Have sort of had blogger’s-block lately, but a few developments this week catalyzed a torrent of thoughts to express, so to avoid an overly indulgent post, will try to contain this to pithy bullets.
Hope you found that video witty, but know it also has a message: Flip cameras, iMovie softare and YouTube accounts, and cute & easy tools like xtraNormal, make many think that enterprises don’t need to pay dedicated, high-end production talent and can go the UGC route for content. — Not true.
15 years ago some people started to expect professional organizations might have web sites built by employees in spare time with tools like FrontPage, and probably 15 years before that people expected that all brochures would be similarly done from general employee pool with onset of desktop publishing tools. — These both also have never turned out to be true.
Web development, print design and other media endeavors are in fact done by hybrids on behalf of corporations, of large institutions and even of major media publishers — a little bit by crafty employees with off-shelf tools, some by particularly skilled & dedicated internal professionals, and still plenty by major external agencies revving up the big guns.
Thus it will be with video and as organizations of all sizes and types use this effective and increasingly available & usable medium throughout operations, expect some to be someone like me playing with xtraNormal, and a lot to be projects with substantial budgets & teams including serious professionals in the craft.
xtraNormal is in fact fun and useful to play with and we look forward to availing such functionality in our pre-production software for better collaborative scripting and storyboard development.
Back to the top few bullets above, in addition to the Ev & Biz videos, recent TechCrunch stories have also included broad criticism of the PR field including with aid of xtraNormal software. Well, we’re not sure how warranted that is, and at least can point to Brian Baumley as a shining counter-example of exceptional PR professionalism (yet another field in which solid professionalism can be just as vital as ever even in these Web 2.0+ days).
A little while back, ReelSEO’s Mark Robertson caught up with Market7 CEO Seth Kenvin for an update on the company, thoughts on how to make video production more efficient and more. The interview serves as a great primer for what can go wrong in any video production, why things go wrong and how Market7 can help address these extremely frequent issues. Check out the video embedded below or with a great text recap over at ReelSEO.
Missed ReelSEO’s review of Market7 back in November? You can check it out here. We’re pleased to say that we’ve already implemented some of the suggestions that reviewer Christopher Rick included in the review!
Caught Meet The Press over weekend about healthcare legislation and international climate discussions. Market7 factors into these top-of-news topics. Work is underway with our first health-oriented customer which publishes a broad library of video for people to be better educated about how to take care of ourselves, looking to video.Market7 for more organization and efficiency in their varying and ambitious production efforts. And overall we are enthusiastic about the environmental implications of helping spread use of video content to connect people and enrich communication without transportation, and for similar reasons about how we enable production teams to be dispersed but cohesive when making video. While we’re not appearing in this news, yet, we are grateful and excited to have beneficial implications for some of these important issues.
I was trying to explain to my collegues the stress and excitement about bringing a film or video production together. The intensely stimulating creativity and planning culminating in an adrenaline-fueled event that is easily 25% of the entire budget blown in a single day.
The analogy I came up trying to describe this process was building a cool model out of Legos like a Star Wars Imperial Walker. I used to love Legos growing up (limitless possibilities of the creative imagination).
A film/video production is like trying to build this model in the most difficult way imaginable. Instead of buying it in a pre-packaged unit, you have to order your pieces individually by UPC codes. You have no idea if you actually ordered the right part because you are ordering from a bunch of different people. You also don’t know if you ordered the right pieces until they show up (if they show up).
When you finally do build the model, you can only see some of the pieces while others you have to assemble behind a curtain. As soon as you start, you have only a limited amount of time to complete the model or you have to send everything back and start all over again.
It’s fun and exciting and the better you prepare, the less likely the chaos of trying to run the production will make you want to cry.
I spent a little of this past weekend at the office with my son. I caught up some on work, and he progressed through some of his Netflix queue. Afterwards we headed to the nearby San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (which was providing free admission for guardians of children 12 & under!) to see a couple of well received exhibits that will close soon. I found the one of Olafur Eliasson to be unbelievably cool, and I highly recommend, but it’s not the topic of this post.
The museum shows a lot of video or media exhibits, in part due to generosity and interest in such art from the family of local venture capitalist Dick Kramlich. These particularly tend to catch the interest of my son, and right now SFMoMa has “Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now” by Douglas Gordon. The whole exhibit is in a single room with a periphery congested by dozens of video monitors each showing a different work by the artist. Examples of the work include splicing together of every one of Captain Kirk’s make-out sessions slowed to barely perceptible motion, split/screen juxtapositioning of two out-of-sync mirrored feeds from the famous “you talkin’ to me?” scene from Taxi Driver with headphones playing the appropriate audio tracks for each ear, and exorcism scenes from The Exorcist overlayed with a more genteel movie from decades earlier.
I was captivated by Douglas Gordon’s work, including an encore visit on our way back to the museum exit. His work is profound aesthetically and philosophically. But technically, I didn’t notice any particularly complex means to reach his impressive ends. He splices, mixes soundtracks, applies filters, overlays feeds. In retrospect, I believe this is true of much of the video and media art I’ve seen: the innate power of the medium to richly capture can empower the artist to efficiently convey a vision. While Gordon is a man of rare imagination and talent, many of us have access to the same techniques he generally uses. With a sound vision and consideration of the medium’s basic principles, using video to enhance a product launch or training package need not be inaccessible.
The museum shows a lot of video or media exhibits, in part due to generosity and interest in such art from the family of local venture capitalist Dick 
