Demo Reel

[Mike Cohen]

Holy Cow!

[Arnie Schlissel]

NOOOOOOOO!!! Make it stop!!

To be fair, the opening graphic was well done. Very Middle-School choice of logo, but well executed. But I find it odd that every time you see type in their carousel of bad video, it’s backwards!

Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/

[Christopher Wright]

I never thought I would say this Walter, but with that excellent example of the stiff competition in your market, you might as well pack it in….

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[Ron Lindeboom]

Man, who is the composer? I’d like to get hold of the soundtrack. (Although I think it is a little wandering and all over the board in its arrangement — a little tightening up and simplifying it a bit more would serve the music well.)

🙂

Ron Lindeboom

PS: In seriousness, I would start with the voice-over and edit an entirely new video, cut to the voice-over (which is the best thing in the video.)

Oh man, I am being ornery again.

[Brendan Coots]

While they may not be stealing anyone’s business you can rest assured that they are out there undercutting prices like mad, hurting everyone in the Atlanta market. Companies like this are springing up everywhere, and the end result is clients are rapidly getting a very distorted view of what kind of price is fair. Not to be the doom prognosticator, but IMO anyone doing medium-to-lower end work is due for a serious reality check during the coming year.

Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com

[Walter Biscardi]

My two favorite things.

Backwards video (and jump cuts) in the spinning wheel.

The music runs out so they just re-start it.

Obviously they are a very cheap video production company using “hollywood technology” and “hollywood graphics” but I would think you’d want to put a little more effort in showing what the videos look like rather than spinning them around on a 3D wheel. But then maybe that’s the point, the viewer really can’t see much of what the video quality actually look like.

They also have a television commercial that’s been airing locally too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgHFPJ-_WFc

If they’re making money, more power to them, you can’t argue with success and I certainly could not touch their prices. Although I wonder what their pricing is for the SteadiCam and Aerial photography, I didn’t really see any of that except for a shaking aerial shot in one of the spinning videos. Hopefully that move to the two white cars was not an example of the SteadiCam.

This is clearly a case of the tools are getting really cheap and I’m sure the labor is pretty darn cheap too.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Ken Harper]

The Bear is looking at me.
I agree that this level of production being promoted as professional and upscale dilutes the market, and makes it very difficult to sell true quality work.

Ken Harper
Sr. Editor/Director of Technical Operations
Moving Pictures, Inc.

[Nick Griffin]

There’s an on-going joke in the advertising business about self-promotion pieces. Something to the effect: “Well it’s as good as we could make it because the client was really difficult to work with.” Moral of the story: the stuff you do for yourself usually defines how good your work truly is or can be.

My guess is these guys (or guy singular, perhaps) are very new to production and simply don’t know what they don’t know. Have to say though that the promo makes it look like they’ve only done about three or four things in total because it keeps looping the same stuff over and over.

OK, Walt. Get your head out of the oven. It’s going to be alright. They’ll probably only take a third of your clients.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Nick Griffin] “OK, Walt. Get your head out of the oven. It’s going to be alright. They’ll probably only take a third of your clients.”

Too funny.

But actually it was self-promotion that prompted me to post the link in the first place. We’re supposed to put our best foot forward in any promotional materials we put forth. After all, we want people to hire us so we want to look impressive to people.

So this is interesting to me that this company considers this to be the best representation of their work. It honestly looks like something from a stock 3D library we used to use back in the early 90’s. They use the word hollywood twice in their voice track, but I don’t see anything that makes their work stand out in any way.

What I see in their presentation is very cheap video production. If that’s what they are trying to get across, it succeeds. And it’s very possible that is absolutely what they are trying to do.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Todd Terry]

[walter biscardi] “We’re supposed to put our best foot forward in any promotional materials we put forth.”

Great theory… but I think a lot of people are like us, sort of the cobbler whose own children have shabby shoes.

We went for years with a crappy demo reel, simply because we didn’t have time to do a good one (I know, I know, baaaad). Finally, we produced a really good one… nice and slick, great content, had Peter Thomas narrate it… really good stuff. But I just looked at it, and now it seems terribly out of date (and the last version is less than a year old).

However, in the case of your colleagues the Bears, I seriously doubt their spots are a lot better than the reel.

Unless they are making spots for less than $200, I’m not sure how they can get business… because they look exactly like $200 cable-produced spots to me.

Then again, my early work is probably on the weak side, too…..

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com