Brendan Coots
Forum Replies Created
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With regards to fixing your current site, I see a few issues that could be fixed easily with your Dreamweaver skills:
1. Your site is useless if people can’t find it. The main way that will happen is through search engines, which have a few requirements before they will even bother with your site. For example, the Title tag is one of the most important ways to optimize your web site for search engine indexing. Every page in your site currently has the title tag “CrewsCreative — Video – Music.” Every page of your site should have unique titles (google will penalize you for repeated titles by simply not listing those pages in search results), and each title should be specific about the focus of that page. For example, your graphics page title tag would be more effective if it read “Austin motion graphics, Austin animation, Austin graphic design – CrewsCreative.” Google and other search engines will then see that you are in Austin (very important since generic searches like “graphic design” are impossible to appear in) and that you offer those specific services. CrewsCreative can come last because it’s not a keyword per se. Until you correct your titles, you are probably not showing up in the search engines at all, which means you are working way harder to market yourself than needed. I would also add a keyword meta tag to every page on your site, again listing keywords specific to JUST that page. For some good info on meta tags and how to use them, search Google for Meta Tags and click the SearchEngineWatch link that comes up first.
2. While this may sound like a personal preference, having a black background is a bit of a mistake. Black is a negative color – it tends to look desolate, uninviting and tense. Psychology plays a big role here. In addition, reading light colored text against black is much harder than dark text against a light background. I would start by redesigning your site to be against a lighter colored background (not necessarily white).
3. The scattered graphics, awards etc. on your home page give your site a sense of chaos. I almost feel like I am looking at someone’s desk, all covered in unrelated post-it notes ;). I would try to consolidate all of your awards into one graphic and use your thumbnails in a more straight-forward manner. I would also consolidate all (or most) of the text into one cohesive block that can be read in neat paragraphs.
4. The left-right-left-right dance that my eyeballs have to do when looking over your home page make it hard to focus and see where I should be looking. I would organize your home page to lead the eye straight downward, all the way down. It can all be on the left side, centered or whatever but it shouldn’t zig-zag and should always be pulling me straight down the page.
5. Your “Services Offered” section of the home page would work better if each item linked to a page on your web site that relates to the link, such as graphics. I would also avoid spreading them out so wide, it feels unnecessarily spread out. Maybe that’s just personal taste.
6. Your awards images on the home page are dwarfed by other items, even though they are one of your key selling points. In your re-structuring of information and graphics, I would make your awards banner much larger than it currently is and give it more prominent placement on the page.
7. May sound harsh, but I would get rid of the photo of yourself. It immediately says “this is a one-man operation” which isn’t a good thing, even if true. You will likely end up hiring freelancers to assist on jobs etc. so why sell yourself as only capable of small, one man projects? In that same vein, May be a personal choice here, but I would changes all instances of “I” to “we” and give the whole message a going-over where you make the company appear to be more than just one man (for example your contact page which says “I would love to work with you”). While there may be plenty of appeal in hiring a one-man operation, that appeal is almost always financial. Implying that you have access to more than one person for jobs says that you can ALSO handle bigger jobs and are more stable as a company.
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PhotoJPEG is pretty good, but it IS a distribution codec, not a production codec.
Since you are pulling this footage into AE and presumably plan to manipulate it, you are introducing major quality loss by using this codec, and you may only notice it once you go to render your final work out of AE.
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This is definitely one of the issues that separates the studios who succeed from those who fail, and it’s so difficult because there is no magic bullet for landing business. You may get 20 different, conflicting answers on what is the “best” way to proceed, because everyone has had success via different means. That said, here’s a few suggestions:
1. Your web site can serve as a great landing spot for potential business. However, as with all marketing materials, most people will directly relate the quality of your web site with the quality of your work, so you need to have a very functional, very attractive site to use it effectively. If I had to be totally honest, I’d say your web site seems a little scattered about, difficult to find where I am supposed to be looking/going, information is not concentrated in areas that make it easy to read, and could use a more polished design overall. Unless you’re an absolutely fantastic web designer, consider hiring a designer fresh out of school to do it. Fix that, and your web site can serve as a brochure for tens of thousands of potential customers, rather than having to manually reach out to every prospect. Don’t underestimate the power of an effective and well designed web site, a LOT of businesses make this major mistake. In this day and age a lot of businesses use the web to source B2B services, and you need to be there front and center when someone in your area is looking.
2. Once your web site is in better shape, you should consider signing up for Google Adwords. It takes a LOT of work to get your web site to rank well for keywords in our industry (such as video production, corporate video etc.) but Adwords will get your web site to the top of the heap right away. Of course you will end up paying for every lead (and every looky-loo as well) that comes your way via Adwords, but it’s worth it if you craft your ads properly and show up in the right keywords. My studio gets a large chunk of our sales via our web site, including Adwords, so it IS worth the effort if done right.
3. Per the web site comments above, make sure every marketing piece you produce – business cards, mailers, collateral – looks absolutely outstanding and professional. There is a lot of competition out there, and if your materials only look so-so, you will get passed over before they ever see your actual work. These materials are your gateway to getting the prospect’s attention, and should be treated as the difference between success or failure.
4. I know how you feel about sales, I can’t bring myself to do it either so my partner does sales while I manage the daily grind of the studio. The key in business is to know your strengths and ONLY do those things, acknowledge your weaknesses and find someone else to do those things. Another issue is that people who do their own sales often suffer from a “feast and famine” situation. When you have work, you are too busy to do sales every day, which means that when the job is done you have no prospects in line and have a month or two of downtime trying to find the next job. Not good. Consider finding someone to do your sales. If you can’t afford it, consider posting some ads on Craigslist or similar looking for a commission-only salesperson. The downside is they will want a large chunk of the pie in return for their risk, maybe as high as 20-40%. Any salesperson, especially a commission-only salesperson, will expect you to have your act completely together, including having quality sales/marketing collateral to support their efforts.
5. In addition to targeting agencies and other studios, doing B2B sales can bring in a lot of work. There are an awful lot of companies out there who don’t hire agencies and/or have projects that are too small to warrant such an expense. This type of work can be your bread and butter as you pursue the agencies which are much more difficult to win over and may have a 2-3 month sales cycle. Consider buying a list of local businesses from Dunn & Bradstreet for mailing sales materials to. They have a program called Selectory that is affordable and allows you to find local businesses, including the names and contact info of the owners, executives, marketing personnel etc. The downside with this approach is that marketing directly to businesses is completely different than marketing to studios, who already KNOW they need your services. You will need to create separate marketing collateral that tells these businesses WHY they need your service, and how you are better than your competitors. This can’t be an appeal based on all the groovy gear you have, they don’t know (or care) about that. It is more based on how your service will help them sell more goods, improve customer relations, train employees etc. Avoid platitudes and do some research to show them hard numbers and facts. Above all, tailor your materials to their needs. A two-man company has no need for employee training videos, and will probably reject the entirety of your offer if it seems generic or not in tune with their specific needs. You could create a mailer specifically addressing employee training and only send it to companies from your list with 20 or more employees, and will get a much better response. Of course you may not even DO training video, this is just an example of presenting the right marketing message to the right customer.
6. Don’t just send out mailers at random here and there, build a marketing program for reaching studios and agencies. It is important that you execute this plan the same way every time, and only tweak when changes are needed. For example, consider setting up a marketing routine that you do at the beginning of every week:
– Call prospect agency, find out who decision maker for video needs would be
– Reach decision maker by phone, don’t waste their time or try to do “sales,” but briefly introduce self and business, ask to send a demo reel to them personally.
– Send demo reel THAT DAY
– exactly one week later, contact decision maker by phone, ask if they received reel, ask if they have a project they might use you on
– that day, send follow-up “thank you for your time” card or letter
– follow up one week later with general sales mailer
– follow up one month later with different sales mailer, and every month thereafterIf you stick to a routine like this, it makes your marketing efforts much easier because you compartmentalizing the various tasks. Spend a day calling prospects from your D&B list. Anyone that agrees to get a reel are added to the “send” list you make in Excel, with a note on the date you should call back (one week later). At the end of the day mail out all the reels and so on.
7. Make sure everyone you know is aware of your new business. You’d be amazed how often friends, family and colleagues meet someone who happens to need what you have to offer and can recommend you to them.
8. Don’t bother going national just yet. You will just end up spreading your marketing/sales budget and efforts paper-thin. Besides, most companies tend to want to work with a local company and will be hesitant unless you are a very large company with strong brand or campaign recognition.
Good luck!
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My studio uses Dell displays exclusively, even on our macs, just because they are so nice and much cheaper than Apple’s displays.
As for workstations, they have some decent options. My only gripe is that they use cheap components, and support is a joke. In general, I would recommend going for the Inspiron 530 or better (ideally an XPS 410 or better), if you can afford it.
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Personally (and others will disagree I’m sure) you are up against a cluster#$&^ of two major headaches – HDV and Premiere, both of which pretend to be “professional” solutions but neither of which really deliver. And while Dynamic Link sounds like such a great idea, I have seen literally hundreds of posts on the various boards with problems arising from DL. A typical workflow, which involves editing until you have final cut, and THEN moving to AE for post, should help clear up some issues you may be facing.
You don’t need HDCAM to get good HD. the Panasonic HVX200 is around $6k, shoots nice, clean HD, offers 4:2:2 sampling and is very easy to work with.
You also might consider bumping up to a Mac Pro with Final Cut Studio, which will immediately make your HD workflow easier and enable you to work with better formats like DVCPRO HD.
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Yeah thanks for catching that. I was working on about 4 hours of sleep when I posted!
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Good point, and honestly I haven’t dealt with the business side of national spots much. I guess I shouldn’t have opened my big mouth, should I? 😉
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First of all that processor is NOT dual core. Hyper-threading is just a little trick that allows multiple apps to access the CPU at once, but it is not (and will never match the performance of) a true dual-core processor.
Second, I would step up to a true dual core machine. This HP model is very outdated (2004, almost an eternity in computer time) and you could get much better for fairly cheap. That amount of RAM and the video card are fine, but the computer itself is a bit dated.
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MPEG2 files use intra-frame compression, whereas After Effects is an inter-frame based app. Put another way, intra-frame files are served up in blocks of frames, whereas AE expects individual frames that it can’t really find in your video, so it takes forever. All MPEG formats seem to choke AE horribly.
Bottom line is, in my experience, HDV is useless. It is really low quality for HD (4:2:0) and a nightmare in post from the edit to After Effects to output.
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Hi Todd,
As a Creative Director/Partner I review probably 5-10 demo reels a week, so I see a lot of work and, like most people here, have developed triggers for what I look for in a reel and what I consider warning signs. That said, this is my completely unvarnished take on your reel and what would be going through my head as a decision maker. Don’t take any of it to heart, I’m just laying out everything I see that could be improved and trying to give you an honest, no-holds-barred take.
1. The intro/outro isn’t as exciting as it could be, mostly because the frames fly-in effect has been done a lot. If you did this in After Effects, you could spice it up by just adding motion blur to those frames so they feel a little more dynamic. Consider using a background besides plain black, or even just adding something over the black that gives it a slight amount of texture. Right now it just feels blank and would never fly in a studio environment. I would also find a font that is a little more interesting for all of your titles.
2. The first piece on your reel is probably the least appealing. It is flatly lit, doesn’t go anywhere very quick and has little to no color correction or set dressing that gives it “life.” That said, you do NOT want to start things off with your least exciting or polished piece because most decision makers will shut off the DVD right there.
3. The X-Games footage is more interesting, but you could really spice it up with some good color correction. To give it that Gen-X look, try crushing the blacks more, give the colors a little more life (bump the saturation or something). Really, all of the footage in your reel could be greatly improved with some basic color correction, and could really look 200-300% better with some more in-depth color work. I’m not talking about tinting the footage or anything wacky, just some cleanup to keep the footage from looking so milky and to give it some life.
4. The piece with the woman in front of the yellow house should probably be your first clip on your video production/editing segment, because it looks the most professional in terms of camera use and clean look. Again, it lacks good color correction, which would increase the production value probably 150%.
5. On the greenscreen shot, consider doing a straight linear wipe instead of the circle wipe. The circle wipe makes it harder to focus on how good your composite was and compare it to the source material.
6. The shot with the boy and girl comped into text etc. is well done, but with some problems that I would really tend to. For starters, mixing strong colors is a bad idea and is almost never done in modern graphics, so most shops might pass you over based on this alone. Blue, yellow and red don’t mix well at all, since all three are very strong and compete for visual attention. Choose one of them, and then change the other colors to complement your main color. You can do this easily by using this web site: https://www.easyrgb.com/harmonies.php. By plugging in the RGB values of the main color you use, it will suggest complementary colors that you can plug in to your other elements. I would also do something to make your blue background more interesting than just flat blue. Try overlaying some animated “stuff” that is set to a very low opacity, or ANYTHING to break it up a little. It would look ten times better if the background even looked like it had a very soft spotlight on it, with the edges falling into a dark blue. I would also consider giving the little sliding panels subtle drop shadows or something to make them pop a bit more, especially the ones that pass in front of your talent.
7. The IMS Video 3d-looking piece is the strongest portion of your graphics reel, and again should probably be first to hook people in.
8. The same color issues noted above apply to the “An IMS Production” closer element. Blue and yellow are just too strong to live in harmony, especially when the yellow is used as an outline on blue text.