Advanced Interactive Marketing from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.
I've been working on a series of videos for the University of Washington's Continuing and Professional Education group. This is the second one that has gone live, and there's at least 3 more in the queue.
Between these jobs, and the St. John's College videos, and some volunteer work for the Folklore Society of Greater Washington (DC, the other one), and pre-production meetings for more video work when I get back from vacation--what recession?
My template for these pieces is basic video journalism style--interview plus B-roll. I shot everything here in 4 hours, and I have about 20 hours in the edit. Much of that is looking at the interview footage and seeing what pieces I can extract to tell the story. The editing style that is emerging for me is to cut away the clutter, and see what is left. Then putting it in different orders to see what makes the best flow.
I have tried making transcripts of the interview, but I've actually found them less useful than I thought they'd be. Or perhaps the usefulness is the act of transcription itself (because I'm the one doing it). I get intimately familiar with the material, and I learn where the good bits are.
One aspect, that I'm becoming somewhat prideful of, is that high production values are not the point. The story is the point. I'm doing all this work solo, camera, sound, interviews. Because I want to. I want the intimacy of just me and my subject. I have no reason to add a dolly track to the mix and color grade it to death afterwords, because those things don't support the story. "Lo-fi video" is my term of choice, which I've stolen from Eva Sollberger, whose work for the "Stuck In Vermont" series has been a big influence for me.
The one piece I now farm out is sound mixing, to Victory Studios. For a few hundred dollars, they send me back, within a day, a perfectly balanced mix, with my badly-set levels fixed and the frequencies tweaked so you can hear the interviews through the music. That is a skill set that is just not worth me learning how to do.
What I am finding is that there is a big demand out there for simple, storytelling video. If you're a documentary-style commercial photographer, the door is open.
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing your experience. Production of these short 'stories' appears to be quite rewarding, but a lot of work. Looks like you have defined a work flow that is fairly efficient.
Posted by: Jeff H | July 15, 2010 at 11:33 PM