[Mike Smith]

I’d be interested to see what she’s picked out.

Though I’d guess that video, like any medium, can be used well or badly, and can be appropriate for some situations and not others.

[Mike Smith]

Hi Cameron

This feels like a tricky but important one ; if you can do something that might improve a few children’s lives, that would be so worthwhile.

So I’ll kick off with an non-controversial one (I think!) It might be better to dub native voice over the other-language clips you want to use – subtitles make the viewer work harder and can break attention to the flow of the story.

Otherwise, I’m concerned that you may have just fallen automatically into a programme approach, without perhaps chewing over some alternatives. Why news, and not human drama, child-centered story, cartoon puppet show ..?

Your post reads as if you’ve already decided on a loosely news-package sort of format I wonder why. Is this approach the best suited to the target audience …?

(Btw, does documentary ever have “b roll”? Just the naming seems to put priority on the talking-head clips to carry content, whether these show a presenter-reporter or an interview subject. Should the pictures be telling the story, whatever that is. with the sound helping to bring added insight and clarity …? )

Target audience: many of your potential audience will already be well involved in helping their children at school. How are you adapting your approach to target those less able or less willing to help?

Or is your audience “new parents” and not those with children at school already – that might change things ..

In many ways, your target might be not “all parents” at all, and certainly not the (caring, probably well educated, perhaps well resourced) parents already likely to get adequately involved in their children’s schooling.

The audience you want to reach, I’d guess, would be those who are not well involved at the moment but who might become so.

Assuming that people don’t know that their children will benefit from parental input in their education and showing “how to” is probably missing a key point. Those who want to help and are motivated will probably already have found ways to help. So is the target those who don’t want to help, or who are not motivated – those whose focus of attention is not so much on their children, but elsewhere?

What about those who feel they don’t have the time or resources to get involved, those who hated school themselves, or who are uninvolved with and unconcerned about their child’s development?

So it might be worth a little research time with some schools, your schools board and the education and social services libraries to try to identify the kinds of factors that go into people not caring about their children, not giving them the time (not having the time) or the input they might benefit from in their schooling, or even feeling positively hostile to or negative about schools and education, or even ambivalent or negative about their child succeeding.

It wouldn’t surprise me if your inquiries showed up four or five different, more common ways in which parents somehow don’t develop the necessary focus on their child’s welfare.

If you could identify the kinds of attitudes and ways of thinking that can lead to this kind of (non-)parenting, then your video might try to find a way to challenge, subvert or change them – though these will be the very people you’ll find it hardest even to get to watch your video.

So how do you create an emotionally engaging, compelling, child-focused story or video that might help to catch the attention of your target audience, and perhaps help some of them to see the world once again through child eyes, develop deeper empathy and concern for their child’s challenges, grow more resolve to move their child’s needs higher up their agenda?

Reference points might include Charles Dickens – always able to catch and hold an audience by putting an innocent child, a victim of undeserved suffering right at the heart of a story with bigger personal and policy dimensions – always able to move us by making the political personal.

Another reference might be Woody Allen’s Annie Hall – the sequence where his junior school classmates, all blank-faced and sweet, foretell in their child voices and comic, adult soundbites the twisted fates that await them in their twenties.

For inclusiveness and variety, it might help to write an interlinking set of half a dozen or so stories – boy and girl, black and white, Spanish and English – to build a theme out of a collection of central characters. Each might face a different kind of issue, with parenting falling down in different ways.

The details would come later, but these might include the high-powered exec who looks down on her spouse and offloads caring to a succession of nannies, the single parent with limited time, the smug couple who put appearances and status before their child’s need, the less-educated parent herself terrified of the teachers and the school ..? Each, of course, a background character for a central child, who might be facing issues of fitting in, of bullying, of not having their interests acknowledged or developed …

Then you’d want to crisp this up into a series of short, sharp, compelling and moving little episodes (a writer’s task).

And then you’d need to find a way to put that on the screen. Assume that full-on drama with child actors and the works is financially out of range. So could you do this with stop-motion models? With puppets? If you use child voices with scripted personal stories, that might have impact.

Or could you use live classroom footage and fictionalised (child or parent) voice-over to tell the stories ? You’d have to be really clear on screen about what you were doing, to avoid misunderstandings. But this could be powerful, if you could make it work. The movie Jonathan Livingstone Seagull reportedly did something similar, using hundreds of hours of wildlife footage and sifting through it to find the pictures to tell the unique, personal story of just one fictional bird.

Or could you have a poet write you a warm, personal and compelling little piece of simple verse encapsulating your themes and message. and play that over playground activities and classroom footage, supplemented with a small number of key “staged scenes” of particular key points ..?

Or could you have a musician create you a song – again, nothing too literal, this should be good work with a theme, not a lecture in doggerel – and use that a base for a child-centered music video …?

One last thought … adult actors in oversize child clothes, playing out scenes in exaggerated dumbshow, almost mime, while a child’s voice speaks their thoughts and concerns …

[Mike Smith]

href=”https://www.dvc.uk.com/acatalog/Comparison_of_different_editing_programs.html

[Mike Smith]

There seems to be a fashion cycle, with organizations rotating every few years between taking everything in house or hiring specialist facilities. Both choices come with pluses and minuses, of course.

I have set up a page in my “buyer’s guide” to try to help people looking into these in-house-or-professional choices. Some have reported it helpful. It’s at https://www.grapevinecommunications.co.uk/buyersguide/diy.html

[Mike Smith]

There are reports that Dell make monitors with the same lcd panels as the cinema displays, but sell them for less.

But you also need a third screen – a dedicated video display, CRT, LCD or Plasma, that is calibaratable, that uses video colour space, and that can handle HD and SD reliably and in good quality.

And you need a card that can feed a signal to that display. The card could be from AJA, BlackMagic or maybe Matrox.

You need suitable fast disc storage – a large, fast RAID for HD work.

You need decent speakers. Some would argue you need a sound mixer or control surface.

Repeater: you need a video display, separate from the computer monitors. If you want to edit high definition, you need a high definition video display, separate from the computer monitors. This starter article might help – you’d need the pro end. https://www.videomaker.com/article/13457/

and this
https://www.glennchan.info/broadcast-monitors/buying-guide/buying-guide.htm

Since much of your work will also be output as DVD, you will benefit from having a CRT so that you can check the interlacing on your standard-definition PAL output.

A thought: HD editing is a market you will struggle to break into in London – very small customer base as yet in UK, supply dominated by a few high-end facilities with skills and kit beyond your reach at present, unless you find a technical / editing partner. Why are you reaching for this – does your market research suggest cusomers in your target market willing to pay a premium for HD / BluRay over high-end DVD in London?

It might be better to separate your thinking into :
1 / what do you want to invest in to build a business?
2 / how do you finish your personal project, started when you had cheap / free access to high end HDCAM and HD editing facilities?
These two may produce different kit lists.

This from the cow might help
https://magazine.creativecow.net/article/building-a-modern-professional-editing-room

or this
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/126/859239

[Mike Smith]

Lots of clients will like working with young creatives. You’d want to make sure you present and position this as a positive – perhaps a direct connection to the zeitgeist, part of the soc networking generation, whatever.

If you don’t take yourself seriously and believe in yourselves, no-one else will. So you’re no doubt presenting credentials short and sharp, showing a great reel – and focusing mainly on the clients, their project, their audience, their objectives.

Creative services can be a complex, costly and visible purchase. Put yourself in the buyer’s position. You’d want a simple, clear pathway to a great end product, reliably on time and on budget, wouldn’t you? So make sure you’re offering exactly that – vision of results, cost level, sign here and let’s get started.

BTW, those that don’t want to pay anything – some of them can’t afford it. Be nice as you kiss them goodbye ; they may be back later in another role, and regardless they are humans and should be treated with human dignity. Some of them will convert to paying customers if they realize they like your stuff, you can deliver and offer value, and that you take yourself seriously. There are those with an approach to negotiating who see every deal as an occasion to extract as much as possible out of the other party. If they don’t ask they won’t get. So they ask. Doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t or won’t pay, if they have to. Just be careful to add payment terms (when the cash is due) very clearly into your contract or agreement.

[Mike Smith]

Many windows systems since the advent of NT are rock stable, and the Mac has improved no end once Apple moved to running a graphical UI on a Unix core (OSX). But you can find bad examples of either.

Windows runs on a wide range of hardware, from dirt cheap to very specialized and high performance, and it makes sense to have your system configured by an expert, ideally at your supplier.

HP has a good reputation in the media world, partly because the machines are good (e.g I have an HP laptop, which hasn’t crashed since purchase, a couple of years back)and partly because they work hard to make sure that they support Avid – which is great software but quite picky about what hardware it runs on.
https://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF04a/321957-321957-64295-321838-3329741.html

At the higher end, along with HP you might consider a specilist like Boxx, who will configure and supply a CS system to suit you, if you like the prices. https://www.boxxtech.com/products/goBOXX/goboxx_features.asp

More at https://www.dvc.uk.com/acatalog/Laptop_PCs.html if you want it, with a video slant.

[Mike Smith]

Many windows systems since the advent of NT are rock stable, and the Mac has improved no end once Apple moved to running a graphical UI on a Unix core (OSX). But you can find bad examples of either.

Windows runs on a wide range of hardware, from dirt cheap to very specialist and high performance, and it makes sense to have your system configured by an expert, ideally at your supplier.

HP has a good reputation in the media world, partly because the machines are good (e.g I have an HP laptop, which hasn’t crashed since purchase, a couple of years back)and partly because they work hard to make sure that they support Avid – which is great software but quite picky about what hardware it runs on.
https://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF04a/321957-321957-64295-321838-3329741.html

At the higher end, along with HP you might consider a specilist like Boxx, who will configure and supply a CS system to suit you, if you like the prices. https://www.boxxtech.com/products/goBOXX/goboxx_features.asp

More at https://www.dvc.uk.com/acatalog/Laptop_PCs.html if you want it, with a video slant.

[Mike Smith]

What are you charging for the market survey …?

[Mike Smith]

The PAL depends a bit what format / codec you are using.

PAL is normally upper field first, apart from the DV family of formats (DV, DVCAM, DVCPro) which are lower field first.

Except Matrox produced a DV codec with upper field first that was in use with some of their hardware for a while .. which is non-standard, not supported by anyone else, may have largely died out.