Sharon Stewart is owner and founder of Love My New Zealand, providing exceptional experiences for people visiting New Zealand. She has an amazing Customer Experience delivery through meticulous planning from a total focus on her client’s needs and wants, so for her to make an unsolicited comment such as this on LinkedIn means a lot to me!

“Just because we’ve always done it this way doesn’t mean we have to keep doing it the same way.”

A holiday job during University studies was bending re-inforcing steel for the foundations of houses and other small buildings turned into a full-time job when I left University. It was manual, hard physical work, and repetitive. I said to my boss “Why don’t we build a machine to do this automatically?” – his response “There’s not the market.” So after a lot more thought I left the job, rented a factory down the road, worked night shift at a plastic factory to pay the rent, and spend a few hours every day building the machine from a design that evolved through experimentation. I also did various steel fabrication and metal polishing jobs to help fund the project and survive. Friday afternoons were a bit laid back, relaxing at the end of a hard week, and the rep from Northern Steel supplies (Dave Lomax) used to drop by for afternoon coffee on his rounds (I regularly purchased small amounts of steel for the various fabrication jobs). One such Friday, Dave finally noticed the machine taking shape in the corner of the factory in SunnyBrae Rd. and asked “What’s that?”. It turned out Northern Steel Supplies where Dave worked were considering suppliers for re-inforcing steel bent to the shape known as “stirrups”. I gave him a hastily scribbled note in pencil on the back of a used envelope not thinking anything would happen. Unusually, Dave called in at lunch time on Monday “Do you want the good news or the bad?” he asked in a sombre tone. Well the good news (which I asked for first) was that I had the contract (subject to various meetings and contracts). The bad news (according to Dave) was they needed 3,000 by the end of the month – in two weeks time… this was more good news for me because just that morning the machine had turned out a run of stirrups without a hitch and the production rate could easily handle that quantity with time to spare.

On the basis of continued supply at really good prices (for me and them) to Northern Steel, I approached other steel merchants and got contracts from Stevensons, John Burns, and others.

So the take-aways I got were – a great sense of accomplishment, in that I actually built the machine, that there was a market, and that I was able to tap into that market – and I got lots of profit over the next few years.

“Success is when preparation meets opportunity”

Max is appreciative of how I’ve helped him with video on his website and lifting the production standards for his home videos – if you’d like to ask about his experience first hand, drop me a line and I’ll forward your details to him.

Max Whitehead (owner, The Whitehead Group) says that videos are not just for large organizations with big budgets.

Max is appreciative of how I’ve helped him with video on his website and lifting the production standards for his home videos – if you’d like to ask about his experience first hand, drop me a line and I’ll forward your details to him.

Many people think it’s easy to make effective digital videos on the web, but there’s a lot more to it than just pointing a camera, adding some titles, and uploading to YouTube or your website.

Truly effective videos share a number of key characteristics:

TELL YOUR STORY WELL

You need to catch people’s attention and draw them in. As soon as you start to waffle, people will go to another website and you’ve lost them. That doesn’t mean that even when you have a great story well told that people won’t wander away – it just means you have a better chance they’ll keep watching and hear your story. Story-telling is probably the most important element.

MAKE IT BELIEVABLE

People can spot in an instant when you’re faking it. So be real, tell the true story, what you really believe, and consider it from the point of view of your viewers. What attracts people to your site and this page? Is your video adding value to the viewer experience, or is it a distraction? Many companies employ actors to present the values and philosophies of their business – in my opinion, this is not as powerful as having a company employee or the boss do it. Flaws and all, ordinary people are often much more believable. A good video company will facilitate the personalities to show through. Being too flashy can backfire.

MAKE IT CONSISTENT

Videos on your website should have a purpose, and the language and content should fit with the page that it’s on, in other words the video should be consistent with the rest of the page content. This does NOT mean that you re-iterate what’s on the page word for word or paraphrase it. What it does mean is that the video should add to the meaning of the page  so that viewers’ experiences involve more senses and thinking processes. That way the content as a whole – web page and video – tells a combined story with much more impact. This is especially effective when the design, i.e. the visual communication, is consistent between the page content and the video.

RELEVANT TAGS

Spend some time thinking about your keywords, description, and tags, when you are planning your video rather than after you’ve made it and already uploaded it. Make sure they are relevant to your video and the rest of the page. For many people the keywords and tags of their digital video content are an afterthought, something that stands in the way of publishing – however they are critical in allowing people to find your videos, and when people view them because the content is relevant to what they searched for, they’ll generally keep watching.

GET THE BEST QUALITY YOU CAN

With today’s digital video cameras it’s easy to shoot video that actually lacks seriously in terms of quality. The quality of your digital video can get in the way of viewers ‘getting’ your message. Think carefully about your filming process…
– sound: what microphone, room acoustics, background noise
– motion: are you using steadyshot when you pan? If so the pan will stutter and look terrible. If your shutter speed is too low, any action will be blurred – this can be desirable or not depending on what you’re trying to achieve
– colour: do you know how to set the white balance, and what effect that has? How about exposure?
– focus: get familiar with how your camera’s focus works. Many digital video cameras have ‘focus assist’ which makes it easy to recognise problems with the auto-focus and then use manual focus to overcome them.
– lighting: there are many resources online that explain the principles of effective lighting, so I’ll invite you to Google them; but do spend some time discovering basic lighting principles and you will be rewarded with much better quality digital video footage.
– resolution: this is the number of pixels your camera has, and the resolution of the footage you take depends on settings as well. So swot up on your camera’s settings – more resolution is better.

The basic concept is of a picture which loads in the web page (the ‘set’), with an overlay of video (the ‘presenter’) that is crafted in such a way that the presenter looks to be ‘present’ in the scene set by the background image.

The technology employed is filming to green screen, using production processes to re-size the video, web coding to play it with the alpha channel intact and position it down to the last pixel, so that the desired degree of realism and ‘presence’ is achieved.

The process requires careful design, with interaction between the video crew, the web developers, and the web designer; every member of this team needs cross-functional skill sets so that each component can be accounted for from design through coding and production.

Lighting is extremely critical, as is the web coding for the video to deliver the type of interactivity that fits with the scene and nature of the content.

If you are interested in this type of process, drop me a line.

One of the challenges with this particular type of project is coming up with example code for the web developer, that provides capabilities such as: timed call-backs (different for different video clips), sensing actions in progress, or if the video had finished. The timed call-backs can trigger web page actions such as JavaScript functions.

I set up the Green Screen including lighting and selection of High Definition Digital Video Camera to achieve high quality, then designed and refined the processing steps to deliver consistent keying to exacting ‘clean-edge’ requirements for this type of web video.

I worked with John de Vere, an accomplished videographer, who has an ideal location for the setup of the studio – it’s quiet, has a high ceiling and enough space for professional lighting, sound, autocue, and High-Definition SONY EX-3 camera. John has since retired and let his website lapse.

This particular type of video relies on Flash, which has over the last couple of years been on the decline and is not supported by iPhone or iPad. The main use these days (for example) is for desktop-based website application training.