Slide Show Secrets Podcast 1: Introduction

Recorded in my mobile recording studio outside of Stop & Shop, Phillipsburg, NJ.

An Introduction to SlideShow Secrets

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There are two ways to approach writing a script for a video: before you shoot, and after you shoot.

Before you shoot is where the majority of corporate and event videos land; after you shoot usually indicates that you’re conducting interviews and won’t know what material you’ll have until after the interviews.

Let’s look at the first, and most traditional, method.

Scriptwriting is the art and craft of extrapolating a creative approach into a working creative plan. A script is more than just the words. It is the blueprint that indicates the structure or flow of your video, what kinds of shots are necessary, what kinds of graphics are appropriate, and what types of music might be used or created.

My first business partner couldn’t do wordplay worth a damn, but he actually was an excellent scriptwriter, because he knew how to pace a piece of communications. So whether you think you’re a writer or not, let’s look at the basics of how you can craft your creative blueprint.

The Creative Plan

Before you begin writing, you must know what your strategy is. Whether you’re selling widgets or telling the life story of Uncle Teddy, you must know your beginning, middle and end.

I believe all creative plans follow some essential rules of marketing, and often follow the same basic outline for the script.

Marketing Rules

These hardly ever vary. They are called many things, have sold a lot of books, and been rehashed over and over.

But they work. It’s all centered around the person you’re trying to sell. It’s called the USP, or unique selling proposition. Ya gotta have one!

From the USP comes the ability to do the following:

State a clear benefit.
Offer proof.
Have a unique angle.
Show the solution.
Eliminate objections.
Ask for the sale (or the demo).

In the video script world, this might look like:

Introduction or Premise
Who we are
What we do
Why we’re different
What’s in it for you
Ask for the sale

Really. That’s about it. Remember, this is not a brochure. People’s attention spans are short.

Now, let’s say you want to create buzz so that MyCO, your new computerized inventory management company (and its new product, “The Docufab 5000”), can look large enough to compete with the big dog in your field— we’ll call them BigCo.

BigCo owns the market, but they’re— big. Slow to innovate, slow to respond to customer requests. They haven’t revised their product offering in 5 years.

You want to eat their lunch (or, if you’re starting out, any lunch at all), and you have just the product to do it.

You have just enough money to make a video, which you figure you’ll show to customers on your laptop, in your trade show booth (a massive 8’x10’ with a table), and on your website.

Video Outline

Let’s look at the questions to ask yourself.

What outcome do I want from this video?
What unique thing does my company offer?
How does this product embody that unique feature (or philosophy)?
What’s in it for the customer?
What hang-ups does the customer have?
How do we move to the next step?

In this case, the next step is being put on the bid list, being asked to make a presentation to upper management, or being asked to make a proposal. This is also the outcome you want.

You are sensitive to the needs of the industry and are a house of ideas, moving fast, developing solutions, adapting your patented technologies to companies large and small.

Your product offers ImageFast, a revolutionary way to reduce scan time and speed document flow over traditional Cat5 wire.

This will offer the customer a direct impact in greater productivity, faster shipping turnaround, less time spent running around looking for manuals, and allow the company to sell and ship more of whatever it is they do. (The hidden bonus is the hero factor— the person that buys this product will introduce such productivity and profit to the company that he or she will get a raise and a corner office— of course, this is implied, not stated.)

Now think it through— you’ve got a better product than BigCo— is there anything that would make a potential customer NOT buy what you’re selling?

Yes, you’re young enough to look like you just came out of high school. Your track record is neither good nor bad— it’s empty. So you get an endorsement from your Uncle Don who’s a well known civil engineer (or a past customer, if you’re well established).  Maybe you grow a beard.

And you offer a guarantee.

The Final Structure

So now, let’s look at our final outline:

Document management is slow, and industry leaders are not keeping up with bandwidth demands.
You have a solution that’s unique to the industry.
You are MyCo, a company dedicated to R&D and solutions that provide productivity and profit. You never stop innovating.
The Docufab 5000 blows the competition away. You proceed to tell how. (features)
The Docufab 5000 will change your company for the better, is upgradable, etc. (benefits)
Let us demonstrate our system and give you a quote. If you’re not 100% satisfied, we’ll (fix it, refund your money, whatever…)— we believe in our product and good old-fashioned customer service.

Okay, now you have to add spice, or the hook— the unique angle. You’re dedicated to productivity, speed, and service. For a fraction of what BigCo might quote for a new system, you will revolutionize the customer’s business with profits, productivity, and volume.

All the customer has to do is— “Do the Math.”

That becomes your hook. It’s a good one, because it de-emphasizes being big, established, safe, etc. It says, “If I can offer you my unique solution to save you this much money— will you take a chance on me?”

We’re skimming the surface, but at least now you’ve thought through goal setting and creative planning for almost any video project, at least those that are written before the shooting begins.

Now, HOW to write the words is another story, and one we’ll tell soon.

Want to see the video this story was actually based on? Go to http://www.vimeo.com/806538.

Next time, more specifics on how to write a script.

I was updating this blog– adding “widgets”– and noticed something called “One True Media”. Enticed by the ostentatiousness of the name, I decided to try it out.

It’s an online “slideshow” and “montage” maker. A slideshow is defined as a series of images with no sound but lots of weird backgrounds and stylesets;l a montage is a slide-sound show with effects, music, and is timed– to an extent– to the music.

I have strong opinions as to what makes a real slide-sound show, and while this isn’t quite it, it is the first on-line offering that seems to get some of the sync-sound concept. (Go to SLIDE-SOUND.COM for more of my thoughts on this.)

It begins with uploading a slew of pictures. I uploaded 100, but there is a limit. My pictures had been “webified” so many were not as good a resolution as the system prefers. (You’ll see graininess in the sample, but I think that’s the fault of low-res pictures.)

Once the pictures are uploaded, you can slip and slide them in order. Then you decide whether you’re making a slide show or montage (which is my idea of a slide show.)

For each image you can specify zoom or no zoom, zoom direction, and a transition between images. You can choose the length of time the image is on the screen, and the length of the transition. This can be wholesale for the whole batch, or one at a time.

Now, the sound part. You don’t upload music. You choose it. You choose from various decent compositions done in a variety of styles by beat, genre, or type (wedding, anniversary, business, etc.) You can choose well-known pop songs which are rerecording of hits (so that OTM only pays for the composition, not the performance. This is a premium feature– more on that later.)

Choose as many songs as you need, order them, and then pick on which slide you want that song to end. The system assumes that the next song in your playlist will start with the next slide. Repeat, and when you tell the last cut to end on the last slide, you’re done.

One True Media is free with a limited feature set- no text, no pop songs, only three songs per montage, no downloading of your montage (you can share it on their sight or embed it on yours.)

For $3.99 a month you get those extras, plus extra themes, transitions, effects, etc.

Here’s my masterpiece:

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Plusses: Easy, fast, free, some sync to sound possible.
Minuses: No uploading of voice or music; limited timing options, must upgrade to download shows, use pop songs, access more special effects and transitions

Not only has the world of video become more affordable, so has the world of still photography. Now that it is all digital, we’ve said goodbye to slide projectors, Polaroid instant film cameras, and even double prints at the FotoMat.

But what have we gained? Incredible quality digital cameras, minaturized storage, on-line albums and presentations, high-quality photo printing at home, and digital picture frames and keychains– to name just a few. Kodak no longer makes or processes most films, but does make and sell photo paper, digital cameras, printers, etc. Polaroid just announced a minature printer you can take with you– to print out pictures from your phone’s camera.

But what’s really been interesting to me is the resurgence of the “slide show”. People want to package their pictures in a linear sequence, so they can tell a story. There are software packages to help, and on-line services that will allow you to quickly cobble together a sequence, store it for free, and share it with your friends. In fact, there seems to be a real interest in bridging the gap between slide shows and videos, creating timed shows with soundtracks– videostories, but with an emphasis on stills.

This is where I came in– oh, thirty—- well, many years ago.

The slide-sound show is a very powerful, immediate, and maleable medium. It’s what I began my career in; it’s what I spend 15 years doing; and only affordable (in relative terms) corporate video tools allowed me to progress beyond it many years ago.

But I never left what I learned behind. I was involved with a company called TVL that made a powertful video-based presentation machine back in the days of the 286 and 386, and way before powerful video cards were invented. You had to know how to make slide shows in order to make a slide sound show with it that would approximante the power of a video– so we trained people how to do that. I’m proud to say we spun off many a successful freelancer from those efforts, and even created something of a slide-sound resurgence.

Even after computers and video processing cards became powerful and allowed more people to crteate presentations and video, the creative lessons I learned in making slide shows stood me well, whether I was making web video, meeting videos, videotapes, Flash loops, DVD‘s, or even Powerpoints.

That’s why I’ve started a site and blog called Slide-Sound. I’m very excited about it because it seems there is a lot of interest in slide shows, especially thse with soundtracks (Google adwords tells me so.)

Please check it out, and if you like it, subscribe. I promise it will be meaningful no matter what your mode of audio-visual communication

Brien Lee

Slide Shows. Slide Talks. Slide-Sound Shows.

These phrases strike fear into the hip and trendy.

And why not? Say “slide show” and your brain is filled with Dad’s vacation slides or a grade school filmstrip on how to brush your teeth. Or maybe you envision an old audio-visual presentation you saw when you were a summer intern: “Improving Tolerances in the 303B Die Cut Assembly.”

But some of us know better. We know what slide shows can really be. And the first thing we need to understand is that they’re not slides, and not even powerpoint. They are moving picture presentations, tanks to today’s advanced slideshow making and video editing software.

As a baby-boom-aged audio-visual and video producer, I should know. I started out in “slides.” And the first thing I and my colleagues across the country did was try to turn the slide show into more of a “movie”— a theatrical experience.

This required sophisticated soundtracks, fade and dissolve effects (pairing two  slide projectors and a “dissolve unit”, and synchronization between sound and picture. Soon, the only thing we couldn’t do was talking heads (thankfully)— the rest was simply using the language of film… wide shot, medium shot, close-up, cutaway, rinse and repeat.

Because motion picture film was expensive, and industrial video hadn’t yet been mainstreamed, slide shows became the corporate norm through the mid-eighties.

Across the country and around the world people produced award-winning communications using slides.

Of course, once video became affordable to the corporates, that changed. But often, the video productions that replaced slide shows actually weren’t as good— why work hard when you can feature talking heads?

But people who were in the slide business adapted their hard knocks techniques to video, and produced some pretty incredible stuff. Video cameras weren’t as portable as a Nikon and a cassette tape recorder, but extraordinary soundtracks, awesome editing, and location video made for a very nice mix— a lot better than corporate talking heads.

Often, the best videos featured still photography— company histories, executive biographies, fund raising appeals. Historical materials were usually print, and fund raising can benefit from the unique emotional power a great still image or still image sequence can create.

Today, video is everywhere— affordable, digital, distributable on the web, on DVD, or on an iPod or flash drive. But a great deal of the video that is out there is “out there”— not really communications, but more real-time stupid human tricks or ego-driven monologues. We all want to be the next big thing.

And so, the thought leaders have forgotten slides, photography, still life, and historical documents.

If we need a slideshow type “thing”, we use Powerpoint, a background template, and a bunch of words and some small picture or clip art inserts. That was special 15 years ago; its not so special now.

But if you mix the editing and distribution power of digital video with the emotional language of truly great slide shows, what so you get?

Well, an award-winning PBS series or ten from Ken Burns, as an example.

A stirring tribute to the retiring head of a company.

A love story more compelling than any wedding video.

A family scrapbook with pictures, clippings, old movies, new interviews, and stirring music guaranteed to reap adoration and applause.

The satisfaction of a a job well done, and even, perhaps, a corresponding income as an independent producer.

Whether you use a slide show program, or a video editing program, slide show techniques are alive, and well, and communicating every day. Put them to work for you!

At NAB (National Association of Broadcasters Trade Show), a company called Black Magic Design unveiled a pair of products designed to take composite or s-video from tape decks, camcorders, and anything else tyhat provides standard definition video and convert the signal in real time to H.264, a high quality compression form that is rapidly becoming the standard for iPod, AppleTV, iPhone, YouTube, and video podcasts. A company called Elgato has had a similar device available for the MAC for some time.

According to Black Magic:

“Because videotapes such as VHS degrade over time, there are millions of hours of home movies sitting on old videotape that need to be converted to computer files or transferred to mobile devices such as iPods, so you can show family and friends!” said Grant Petty, CEO, Blackmagic Design. ”But there are also millions of hours of professionally videotaped programs that need to be moved to computers so they can be sold to customers online, or used in IPTV applications. I feel this is an incredibly important product for moving all that television content into the future. The future is mobile and in your hand!”

That’s the press release’s exclamation point.

Included with the USB hardware is the Video Recorder software which lets customers capture video with easy to use controls. When this software is used with the Video Recorder SDI model, users can enter in and out points for the deck they are capturing from. The Video Recorder software also allows users to set video scaling to reduce the resolution for mobile devices. To make great captured movie files, the Video Recorder software allows interactive cropping of the video edges, so analog blanking, VHS switching marks, and VITC timecode artifacts can be cropped out.

If you’re producing Tribute videos, corporate history videos, or anything that requires the use of old analog tape materials, these babies should be a godsend. Essentially, your video goes to your hard drive already converted and ready for editing (in many edit programs.)

H.264 is always going to look better than your old Betamax or VHS tapes, so there should be no apparent degredation.

Of course, for really awesome digitizing of old video signals, I still recommend the Canopus ADVC-300, which has a time base corrector built in.

Brien Lee

The view out my window here at Union Square in Phillipsburg is pretty neat. We look out onto the Northampton Street Bridge, also known as “The Free Bridge” (because it is a free alternative to the toll bridge). Because it is free it is awfully busy. The bridge crosses the Delaware connecting Easton, PA and Phillipsburg, NJ.

Add to that a gas station on the Jersey side (nearly 30 cents less than tax-heavy PA), and you have two-way traffic that never stops flowing.

I discovered a neat program called iStopmotion from Boinx for the Mac.

It specializes in stop-frame animation– claymation type stuff. But it also does time-elapsed videography as well. Set up a camera, and it will record stills to your hard drive automatically at whatever interval you set.

There are a lot of programs out there to do stuff like this, especialy on the Windows side, but this one seems particularly easy and elegant. Note however, that the price increases dramatically if you want to do Hi-Def. That kind of ploy can only last so long as high definition becomes the prevailing standard.

Anyway, here’s a little ditty I did out my window– a four hour stretch in the afternoon during the bridges peak hours. Note the freight train coming straight through the square and the sun moving across the top of the picture… and the slow lapse into night.

Union Square, Phillipsburg, NJ, 4:30 pm from brienlee on Vimeo.

Shot and edited by Brien Lee

This blog– VideoStory Secrets– is intended to be a free repository of tutorials, lessons, samples, explanations, and other information regarding the art of “Video Storytelling.”

We did have a few entries already uploaded, and propagating nicely, when someone I hit– the wrong button.

Well, you know what havoc that can wreak. But it gave us a chance to enhance a few things, and develop more free offerings, which you’ll see here soon.

In the meantime, I realigned some of the website hosting, moved this from there to here and there, and here we are.

And just in time. Today, we quietly launched the sale of our book, “Tribute Videos for Love & Money”, which is really a book about how to tell a video story, or more bluntly, how to make really good videos.

It uses as it’s main examples “Tribute videos”, videos produced to tell someone’s life story, either for a company or private (personal) function.

It is 120 pages or so, generously illustrated, and is accompanied by tutorials and samples, some ready now, some ready soon.

I hope you’ll consider looking at what the book has to offer and perhaps purchasing a copy for your family video-maker, your company video people, or yourself. There are a lot of good ideas in it, and a pretty good explanation of the philosophies and structures of videomaking we have been using for the past 35 years.Go here: http://www.videostoryschool.com.

Thanks

Brien Lee.