Kevin Flaherty, the guy who runs marketing at the wiki company Wetpaint (and does killer zombie voices) invited me to the filming of Wetpaint's latest experiment: parody commercials.
I had no idea what to expect, but it was awesome. It was the first time I'd been on a real set during filming. It was just like our studio at home, except this set had giant lights, real actors, a director, lots of expensive production gear and fewer whiteboards and markers. Just like it, I swear!
The idea behind the videos is to illustrate the difference between Wetpaint wikis and other wiki platforms via parodies of the Mac/PC ads. In this case, Wetpaint is personified by a hip, attractive actress named Maya and "wiki" is played by an actor named Troy Lund that kept us laughing all day. The videos are directed by local director Branson Veal.
This last one is the most original and my overall favorite. It starts as a behind-the-scenes look at the video's production (when wiki first meets Wetpaint) and ends as an eHarmony parody.
VizThink is a conference about visual thinking. We'll be there leading a yet-to-named session that will focus on our story and the role of video and simplicity in communicating ideas with clarity.
Since we started making videos, I had been meaning to talk to Dave Gray, the chairman of Xplane, author of the Communication Nation blog and the person who got VizThink off the ground.
We had a great chat recently and I learned more about VizThink, which is not just a conference, but a community for people who are interested in visual thinking. Dave and Xplane have been working with visuals to communicate more clearly for over 15 years.
Tom Crawford is the CEO of VizThink and is putting together what will be an awesome event. I'm excited to meet people like Scott McCloud of Understand Comics, Kevin Cheng of OK/Cancel and Nancy Duarte who worked with Al Gore on the presentation used in An Inconvenient Truth.
Unfortunately, this site is getting absolutely HAMMERED by comment spam from a single source. 100's of bullshit comments a day for a few days now - all peoples' names. Akismet (a comment spam fighting tool) isn't picking them up and I'm tired of dealing - especially with a weekend on the way.
I'll turn on the comments again soon. If you want to be in touch, please use the contact form.
In almost any video project, lighting is a huge factor we've learned so much. There are few more stark examples of our learning curve than the listing of our videos on our YouTube page. Notice the gradation of the white backgrounds:
You can see, right in the listing, our learning curve. Here are a few things we learned:
Software works for lighting. We use Final Cut Express for editing our videos and Sachi has become a pro at adjusting the videos to be more bright using the color correction settings in the software. Color temperature is a big factor in making the whites look clean and bright.
Exposure. We have become much more manual users of our camera - a Sony DCR - PC1000. We experimented with exposure and have found a manual exposure setting that works on the whiteboard. It's easy to tell when it's over-exposed by the look of skin tone. Also, over exposed videos come out pink when viewed online.
White Balance. The same is true for white balance - manual settings create consistency.
Of course, when it comes to the actual lights, we're still using good ole' shop lights from the hardware store. We'll continue to tinker with these - maybe the tinfoil and posterboard isn't sustainable and may be a fire hazard.
Either way, we're excited to have discovered small things we can do to raise the visual quality of the videos.
Every once in a while we get an email that reminds us why we started making videos for the Common Craft Show. Here is a quote from an email today:
I love your films! We were so inspired by the Wiki-Plain English that we have now set up 5 active team workspaces and have totally revolutionised the way we work. (I spent 10 years as a TV/Radio Producer and now work in behaviour/social change communication and I can say I have never come across a short film so motivational yet so simple!)
Yay!
This email put smiles on our faces. Any thing we do that can help people create positive change is time well spent.
When asked what sort of videos we make it's a bit hard to explain in normal terms. They're not really instructional or how-to, they have elements of marketing and promotion and some say they are entertaining. Here's a few options - maybe you have more?
Infodocutainmercials?
Explanatainment?
Docuinfotainment?
Explanapromomercials?
Explanadocuinfotainmercials?
or maybe just...
explainment?
By the way, don't expect to see any of this on the Common Craft business cards - just for fun.
