Simon Stutts
Forum Replies Created
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There’s a video called “Pollinate” done by the studio Belief a few years ago. I think its still floating around on the internet. Google around for it, and you should find it (FYI – if memory serves, it has some mild NSFW images in it). It’s a great presentation on inspiration and creativity.
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One thing I would say…
The promo is cool. I like the look of it, and the animation is slick – however: to someone who knows what they are looking at, it SCREAMS Video Copilot (Flares, Sure Target transitions, animated flourishes, etc).
For future projects, I’d work at incorporating techniques learned from VC in less obvious ways. I don’t mean to demean your hard work, and its not by any means a bad place to start from, but it is something to be careful of, especially if you are dealing with video or graphics professionals (who will spot Video Copilot stuff immediately).
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Bob Zelin is my hero.
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So…you did a good job, went above and beyond, the client apparently LOVED it and now you are trying to sabotage it? I don’t get it, dude. If its about the money, then…you do not work for the client. You work for your boss. On salary, yeah? If your boss wants to charge a fee for design services, or whatever extra time it takes to generate a high-res still, then ducky for him. You make your salary. If you need/want more, re-negotiate or start picking up freelance work.
Also: No one gets royalties from logos. You should never “rent” your visual identity from someone else. Own it or find a new designer.
[Aaron Cadieux] I am not a graphic designer. I am not paid to be a graphic designer.
Be careful, sir…
This is a sentence that the 20 year old who will work for 2/3rds of your salary will never say. -
[Charles Williams] “Please let me know what you think.”
I think that there are high school students producing higher quality work than this.
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This wiki has a full listing of everything that went down with the Batman ARG. If you are not familiar with it, it is seriously worth a look. The level of imagination and planning that went into this is unreal.
https://batman.wikibruce.com/Timeline
Truly mind-blowing. My favorite example of viral marketing that works.
Favorite point:
One of the links in the chain of the viral game leads to a website, which has a list of addresses on it. Participants are warned not to phone ahead, but to go to the location and pick up a package for “Robin Banks.” All of the locations are bakeries. When whoever got to the location first asked for the package and received it, the website was updated to show that. The packages received were cakes with phone numbers written in icing on them. When the participant called the phone number, the cake starts ringing. There’s a plastic bag with a cell phone and some one-of-a-kind joker-themed knicknacks inside. These phones then received text messages, which their owners shared online with the rest of the community, leading to the next link in the chain.Totally insane. Nothing like traditional marketing. I love it.
AND – most importantly – it catches and holds the fascination of the die-hard fans and early adopters, who in turn go and tell everyone in their sphere of influence how amazing they believe the movie will be.
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Tim and Chris have pretty much covered this, but – it feels like you’re combining to very different approaches to marketing – viral video & email blast to a client’s list have very different styles of reaching the audience.
Viral videos can be intricately planned (as Tim pointed out), and even the way that they are released and promoted can be delicately planned out – but it’s quite a bit different from the standard methods of marketing. I would question the effectiveness of “viral videos” that are mass emailed to a client’s email list. Viral video is all fine and good – but to be effective it needs to be shared socially – and email is not really an effective social environment.
If someone tweets about some cool video they watched, and I watch it and like it, I can re-tweet that to my list of followers within seconds of watching the video, with little to no effort on my part. They can then do the same, and within a few minutes hundreds of people may have come into contact with it. Same with facebook and other social networking sites. If I were you, I would look to these social networks as the primary distribution center for the viral videos you are making.
The big E on the eye chart, though, is that if the company has to email me (and all their other customers) their latest “Viral Video” – then it’s not a viral video. Find ways to reach your upstream influencers and early adopters, and push the video where they will see it (as well as all the major internet media channels) – then let them filter it downstream to the public.
Tim has alot of good examples on his post. For more crazy stuff, take an hour and break down 42 Entertainment’s Alternate Reality Game that they did for the Dark Knight.
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That’s pretty cool.
Not for sure how they did it, but it kind of looks like they did a variant of the whole “data-moshing” thing seen in the Chairlift and Kanye music videos – they messed with video compressions, deleted keyframes, etc – then used the “errors” as an effect. At least that’s what it looks like to me – compression “errors”.
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I almost threw up looking at that picture. You are a brave man, sir.
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[Rob Grauert] “And my two supervisors are definitely in the middle of no where. They’re shooting a hunting show in Arkansas, Louisiana, etc. Sometimes they are at a hotel that has internet, but phone calls are often very hard to hear and are always cut off eventually.”
This may sound stupid, as I’m guessing you’ve already done this, but I’ve found that texting works wonders when the bosses are in bad cell signal territory. Text messages only need a second or two of stable signal to pull down into the phone. It’s def helped me a time or two when I couldnt get the boss on the phone but needed to keep him appraised of the situation/get his judgement on something that was above my authority to decide.
Keep your head, and do your best. Hope it works out.