We just received word from our client Stevn Lovink, founder of Planet2025 Network, that the three videos we were hired to produce for the World Bank as part of a worldwide conference held in Zaragoza Spain were a great success!

The goal of the project was to create a series of three short videos to be used in a week-long live, multi-location, globally networked conference, with groups of participants located in nearly 30 countries, all participating live via GDLN conferencing software. The videos were designed to be the catalyst for those discussions, which centered around the global challenges taking place in the water sector.

Each video tackled a unique area, such as the societal values necessary to foster a water and life-sustaining civilization, or effective methods of communication about water issues such as waste, pollution and leadership corruption, and accelerated means of educating a global populace about these urgent issues.

It was challenging work, which is just the sort of thing we love around here! You can view three of them on YouTube (as a matter of pride, I feel I must mention that YouTube really distorts the quality of both the audio and video. We delivered a final cut with a much higher production value, but YouTube is the easiest place to see it online, so the tradeoff for the client was worth it. Please be sure to click the “View in High Quality” link right below each video as it loads. Thanks!)

Values for a Life Sustaining Civilization (Part 1)
Values for a Life Sustaining Civilization (Part 2)
Accelerated Learning

Recently Google refined its algorithm (that mystical unknowable divine fate by which we all live and die) and I was pleased to learn that our SEO and content strategy efforts on behalf of our clients and even our own site have yielded positive results in page rank, organic search results and traffic. We are proving that a video strategy, when combined with other best practices, really can propel a site to higher places.

To that end, we are making a shift in our basic assumptions of web site design, and will be focusing much more on making SEO decisions from the beginning, partnering for much of this work with Taylor Hill, a consultant with a good and growing track record for helping new and existing sites fare better under the omnipotent rule of Google.

We just wrapped a large video project for the World Bank, and in it one of the people being interviewed made a comment I have been quoting to clients for two weeks: “No one changes their behavior when confronted with naked facts and figures. If we expect people to see things our way, we have to tell stories. It is the narrative that motivates change.”

Every company, no matter how large or small, has a story worth telling. A story that, if told well, can cause customers, clients and prospects to react in a desired way. I have thought about how video interviews and productions can help to accomplish certain conversion goals, such as overcoming purchase resistance, managing fears (medical, etc.) and helping to introduce people to concepts and ways of thinking that funnel them deeper into the sales process.

Even if it’s just about helping prospects get to know your company better before making first contact, video is a powerful storytelling tool. See below for two examples of how video is being used by one of our clients in San Antonio:

(Patient Testimonial for Integra Clinical Research)

(Hiring Video for the medical group including Integra Clinical Research)

(NOTE: For video editors and production personnel) The process of timing script treatments and voice overs to match image sequences has been laborious and frustrating for me, mostly because keeping a stopwatch handy has proven harder than you might imagine. I’ve had at least a dozen, from the Sports Illustrated freebies, to magnetized kitchen varieties (until it corrupted a floppy back in the late 90s) and wristwatches. Dead batteries, chronic “borrowing”, stuck buttons, and tiny controls - these reasons and more have kept me hunting for better solutions.

A rock-solid clock is impossible to find in your typical NLE, which, in the typical work environment, is nothing close to real-time sync, what with all the rendering going on on the fly. Even when it looks pretty solid, it’s not. In a pinch, I have been known to throw a CD into a portable player, and use the time readout and play/pause controls to good effect. That is until I have a sequence with a total time of 00:07:53:00 and a CD with song times not exceeding 4 minutes. Stuck again. I’m a musician with decent rhythm, so I’ve even tried tapping seconds out with my hand, but try doing that while reading a script in a normal cadence, and you’ll understand why asylums were built.

Anyway, I Googled the term “online stopwatch”, and what do you know! Here’s the one that I have fallen in love with, for it’s simplicity, and the fact that it can operate both as a stopwatch and a countdown clock.

Accessible as an online version and as a downloadable Flash .exe, I find myself using it for a whole lot more than video work. (meeting clocks, get-up-and-stretch reminders, etc.)

It’s a freebie worth grabbing!

Those of you who took high school economics will no doubt recall the way in which a product market works: we start with design, then production and manufacturing, then distribution, advertising and finally purchase and consumption (I invite any high school economics teachers to correct my over-simplified explanation of complicated market dynamics in the comments below).

As a company involved in mostly early stage market activites - media design and content creation, audio and video production - we rely on other companies in our market to supply us with manufacturing and distribution, and ultimately we need consumers to complete our existence.

These days, audio and video distribution is easily accomplished via the web. But in a crowded marketplace with more choices than ever before, consumers rely on search to bring them what they want, when they want it.

For this reason, it makes a lot of sense for Google to offer a media server gadget, essentially bridging the gap between the TV set and the vast content offered on the net.

Sure there are other media player/content services out there that promise to deliver web content to the home theater, but none have the power of Google’s search to find virtually any audio, video or photo file on the web. And while Google is notoriously boring in the GUI department, no one can argue their superiority in their stock and trade. Combine that with the content from Google’s subsidiary YouTube, and this is clearly the future.

For now, it’s a Windows-only gadget, and judging from the comment thread, it is not without some beta-stage issues. Still, who can blame Google for testing the waters and extending the usefulness of its search to the TV?

(Self-Promotional Addendum: I think this gadget would be made all the more amazing if the content it displayed became participatory through the CrowdAbout Social Media Player technology!)

Harkins Creative took on the challenge of using viral video posted on YouTube to stir interest in a web project we were involved with. It was like research into what makes web video work, and with 100,000 views as of Sunday morning, I think we are proving the point and the concept petty well!

This was a fun little project, and the intent was to simply make an entertaining video with a “hook” (pardon the pun, watch the video and you’ll understand) that would get people to visit a site. We did very little promotion, other than posting it on YouTube, but we thought very strategically about what might work there.

Harkins Creative produced a site intro video for Planet2025.tv. 18 months later, it is still being used on the home page of their site, and today we received notice that it had just been announced as a Panda Awards finalist in the Wildscreen Film Festival! Final judging will take place in October.

Below is the video entered into the New Media category: