Then this is the workshop for you! You’ll learn how to create videos for social media with animated text and graphics, how to create visual templates and how to use these in a video editor to quickly create unique and branded content.

So, make sure you sign up today to secure your place. You don’t want to miss out on this workshop!

Who is the workshop for?

This workshop is for business owners who are looking to invest a little time in creating more dynamic and visually appealing content for their businesses.

What will the workshop cover?

This session will cover everything you need to know about creating and editing video content for your social media platforms. You’ll learn about:

• Adobe Photoshop and video editors such as Davinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro
• Creating two or three templates to demonstrate different techniques
• Importing templates into video editors
• Pre-recorded videos and how these can be used
• How to export video files using a combination of square and vertical formats
• There will also be time for a Q&A.

Workshop session will take approximately 1-1.5 hrs.

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Who is the workshop for?

This workshop is for business owners who are looking at using YouTube as part of a long term strategy in developing an online authority in your field of expertise. YouTube can be hard to get started, so this workshop is activity based to get you going.

What will the workshop cover?

The workshop will be delivered over 4 sessions. Each session is designed to move you through the various stages of producing your own content.

Session 1: Introduction – This explains what YouTube is and why you might want to create a YouTube channel. It also has a workshop exercise where you need to think about what your channel would be about? And why?

Session 2: Filming the video – This starts out with how to define the content for the channel. We go through an exercise to help you create ideas that you would like to present. There will be a Q & A to clarify this part of the process. We look at creating good video titles and how to approach scripts for your video. We look at equipment, video editing software, music licensing and thumbnail design. We will go through the ideal structure of a video and how you can get going with the equipment you have. And there will be some homework to do before the next session.

Session 3: Video Editing – This is how to do some simple editing on a computer. We’ll look at free and paid for video editing software and how you can import your video files, edit them, export the video and upload it to YouTube.

Session 4: Review – This final session is a review that offer a live Q & A to answer your questions.

Each workshop session will take approximately 1-1.5 hrs.

The post Workshop – Getting Started with YouTube appeared first on Still River Films.

Who is the workshop for?

This workshop is for business owners who are looking to attract more people to their products and services; by offering value and presenting themselves as the guide who has a plan to make their clients lives easier.

What will the workshop cover?

The workshop will cover a number of topics which will include:

• How you are most likely already using live streaming technology
• Why live streaming is an opportunity to engage people
• How to setup a mini studio and equipment for live streaming
• Using YouTube to live stream your content and what should that content include
• How to step up your game and presentation
• How to setup and configure live streaming software (free)

The workshop will take approximately 1 hour including time for some Q & A and discussion if required.

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What will the event cover?

You’d be surprised how many websites don’t position their products or services at solving their customer problems. There are many common mistakes and this session will offer a strategy in re-evaluating your website communication.

This session will cover three core topics, your website’s core messaging, a strategy for aligning your communication and how to engage with the world’s second largest search engine, YouTube. We’ll look at:

• Common website mistakes
• Simplified messaging
• Lessons learned from the Startup Academy
• Missed opportunities – YouTube description and your website
• Website design considerations

Who is this workshop for?

You’d be surprised how many websites don’t position their products or services correctly. This workshop is for business owners who want to refine their brand message and increase customer engagement online.

The post Workshop – What’s your message? appeared first on Still River Films.

How to create great short videos to boost your business

Join us for mince pies and a fantastic workshop on creating great short videos to boost your business! Experienced director and film maker Gwyn Cole will be in the Hub discussing how video can be used in business and sharing some top tips on creating your own great promotional videos.

Who is the workshop for?

This workshop is for start-ups and business owners who are looking at using video to promote their business.

What will the workshop cover?

• An introduction to why video is an amazing medium
• Looking at potential uses of video
• Case studies of how others use video
• Developing a strategy that takes your key values into account
• Basic elements of “story” and how you can engage viewers
• Preparation for content creation
• The typical process from recording, editing and publishing
• What gear do you need?
• How to set it up?
• Techniques for reducing pressure of talking to camera
• Next steps on what to focus on first

The post Workshop – How to create great short videos to boost your business appeared first on Still River Films.

They question things like, who will even watch it? How would they distribute it? Will they see a return on investment? These are questions that any business, large or small will have to face. Its particularly difficult if the business has never engaged with video before. To them, video marketing is a new concept and that faces competition with traditional marketing strategies. There’s a safety factor in pushing out the brand message through newspaper advertisements, brochures, leaflets and other traditional mechanisms. Furthermore, there’s a slight hesitation on how effective the brand message will be when translated into video; not to mention that video production also sounds hard and potentially very expensive. I think there’s a misconception that making such investments is something that big companies do. That somehow their access to large budgets affords them the privilege to hire large video production teams and to deliver their brand message through broadcast television. Yes, it’s true that large budgets can do this. But the playing field has changed. The Internet and Social Media are continually changing the landscape, no matter whether the business is small, medium or large.

The impact of social media

It’s confusing for businesses though… every time video marketing comes up, social media appears to be at the heart of the discussion. Yes, social media is a great way to distribute video. But if you’re a company that makes nuts and bolts, then it’s hard to see how social media can benefit you. Social Media is not the right solution for every business. It simply comes down to this; does the business impact “people” in someway? If the products and services affect people directly, then you’re most likely going to want to attract them through social media. But whether or not you’re a “people” business, the questions remains; does this impact your video marketing message? Maybe, but the Internet is a big place these days! There are many more opportunities to deliver that brand message right in front of a targeted audience, like YouTube or the business’s website for example. It must also be said that not all social media is equal. Facebook in particular is geared towards “people”. But when you look at Twitter, it leans more toward “delivering a message”. Donald Trump’s success at distributing his message through the 2016 American Presidential elections is proof enough that Twitter works.

Social media and Facebook in particular have changed how businesses approach their marketing message. The allure of Facebook for many businesses has seen a mixed bag of reactions. In some cases businesses have wholeheartedly embraced the wave of social media, going so far as to create specialist teams to distribute content on not just one, but many social media platforms. Whereas the majority of businesses have taken a more cautious welcoming – dipping their toes in and creating a business profile page; making the occasional post and advertising a bit of news here and there. Unfortunately, this kind of limited social media engagement makes it more difficult to gauge the success of the business brand message.

Video-based content in social media

Any business that has tried to maintain an active presence on social media is already aware how much work is involved. It’s tough work updating the news feed with valuable content! Everyone dreams that they’ll make that “one” post which goes viral and generates huge volumes of traffic. The news is that those days are largely over… Many industry observers are looking to the next big thing in social media, and many believe its video.

Some large organisations have already engaged with this concept and are expanding their video production teams exponentially! Elite Daily, an online publisher expanded their team from 7 to 35 people within a year. They produce two videos a day and have accumulated a staggering 153 million views on Facebook alone; nearly 19 million of which were within a single month. Likewise, Quartz another online publication created a 3-person video production team to create videos solely for Facebook and YouTube. Making it a fascinating example where the videos were not even intended for their own website. In 6 months, the company accumulated 45 million views over 130 videos and 43.4 million of those views occurring on Facebook. Not every business can afford to create a video production team, but I think these examples show that there is an audience out there greedy to consume video content!

There has never been a time where video has been more distributed and more available to every business than right now. It’s clear that video is here to stay! And yes, it is true that Facebook is leading the pack in getting people to consume even more video content. Facebook’s development in auto-play video has indeed paid off. The platform now experiences countless billions of video views every single week. Other social media platforms have followed suite and expanded their offerings to include video content as a result. Instagram for example, now make it possible to post 60-second auto-played videos. While other platforms like Twitter have added multiple options for distributing video. You can post a video directly with a maximum playing time of 2:20 minutes, or you can present a video through a posted website link that exposes an associated video. In the later case you need to become whitelisted, but once you’re approved it gives you a special status and it activates the video player card within a Twitter newsfeed.

The marketing message on mobile phones

Marketers and advertising agencies are pushing Facebook video mainly because it’s the one place where they can deliver a brand-focused message on mobile devices. Back in January 2015, Facebook reported that 65% of all video views were through mobile devices. The latest Facebook April 2017 figures reveal that this has increased to 92.7%, enabling access to 1.658 billion mobile users worldwide. There is no doubt that social media is of huge interest in those businesses wanting to distribute their brand-marketing message on mobile devices. One might ask but why is mobile so important? It’s because mobile has traditionally proved to be a challenging platform for marketers. People pick up their phones 150 times a day! People’s attention is short, but frequent. One of the aspects that marketers have traditionally struggled with is the limited Internet browser functionality on mobile platforms – it prevents them from discovering people’s likes and dislikes. However, marketers have had to become quite creative to gain people’s attention because it is spread across different apps, messaging and other mobile services.

It shouldn’t be surprising that businesses have been embracing video ever since it was introduced on Facebook. The main reason being that over 40% of people who viewed the videos had viewed the entire video. This was in the backdrop of an industry average that was 25% as far back as 2015. Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg said in November 2015, that 1.5 million small and medium-sized businesses shared videos during September (of that year) alone. Just 11 months earlier in December 2014, Facebook had overtaken YouTube in the number of video uploads made to each respective platform. Thus, Facebook has become the first choice for many marketing campaigns, not just because it has become the dominant video platform, but marketers can also acquire viewing statistics and target advertisements to specific audiences.

Social media has rewritten the rules for video

Facebook’s effect on video has totally uprooted many of the traditional ideas for video content creation. Many have found that simply posting their TV commercials hasn’t translated into any meaningful user engagement. IAMS, the cat and dog food company tried uploading their 15 and 30 second television commercials to Facebook, only to discover it didn’t work. This is despite the fact that people love cats and dogs and that Facebook is filled with cat and dog videos! Kinetic Social, a digital brand marketing company, revealed that video advertisements from pet brands had a less than 10% completion rate. This resulted in IAMS having to reinvent their approach in their social media video marketing efforts. Their biggest challenge was getting a brand-focused message within the first 3 seconds of the videos. They had to find a way to highlight the IAMS brand and associate it with cats and dogs. This is what makes it more difficult to create impactful videos for social media. Videos designed for social media have to overcome a few challenges such as the potential lack of sound, people’s short attention span and making videos that are visually useful and/or entertaining.

Having said all of the above, recent reports imply that Facebook video continues to evolve and change. There is new evidence to suggest that long-form video is gaining traction on Facebook. So the rules are once again being rewritten… Time will tell how Facebook video will evolve, but it is true to say that if you are an entrepreneur or a small or medium sized business, your competitors are already using video to conquer your customer base. Don’t get left behind… now is the time to invest in video marketing initiatives!

The post Video Marketing in a Facebook World appeared first on Still River Films.

Discovering sound recording through the mindset of the masters has most definitely left me wanting more! I’ve met the most amazing people through my various film projects and also the people who are involved in the industry. I think what I really love about film is that you use all your senses to experience the world around you. Once you understand lighting, you end up seeing beautiful light everywhere you go. The same goes for composition, colour, movement, speed and of course sound. One of the reasons that filmmaking is hard, is because you have an overload of all these amazing sensory elements of the world around us. A successful short film in my view, is how you interpret this sensory overload and apply it to “story”. Story is everything! Its the principle means by which we engage and comprehend an underlying message, and above all else, its how the story makes us “feel”. Expanding my horizons in sound had become one aspect of filmmaking that I desperately wanted to cultivate, in order to help me make stronger stories.

The tricky question is who do you learn from? My simple answer to this question is “if you want to know anything, go to the horses mouth”. In the arts this is a little more tricky to identify. One day I was browsing through YouTube and came across a video that focused on the sound recordist, Chris Watson. The film titled “The Colour of Sound” excited me immensely, and I had my sights set on the one person I absolutely wanted to learn from. You can tell in the 10 minute segment that Chris is deeply passionate and he looks beyond the technical noise that seems to pervade the industry. I loved the way Chris describes how he really listens to the environment and this was exciting and fresh to me. I was delighted to find that Chris does sound recording workshops through WildEye. An organisation dedicated to wildlife training and conservation amongst their portfolio of functions. Now, I wouldn’t say that I was a person who was deeply connected to nature and wildlife, despite having been born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and living in Southern Africa for my entire childhood. So going on a wildlife sound recording workshop did seem a little daunting to me, but I knew that whatever I gained from the workshop would put me in the right mindset. And so that became my ultimate outcome of the training, “To gain an insight into the mindset of a sound recordist”.

Unfortunately I missed out on the 2014 workshop, but happily booked onto the next one to be held a year later, in October 2015. I set off on my journey, very excited that the day had finally arrived and I eventually found the small country lane of the venue’s location, deep into the countryside in Norfolk. I was greeted by Piers Warren, the founder of WildEye. Everybody was very friendly as if you had known them for years. It was immediately evident I was amongst great likeminded people. Jason Peters, the course co-ordinator at WildEye showed me around the venue and introduced me to the world famous, Chris Watson. We waited for the others to arrive while I chatted with the delegates who had already arrived. After dinner we entered the main room for our evening session.

First up was sound recordist, Jez Riley French. Jez and Chris were the main instructors for the wildlife sound recording workshop. Jez talked for over 2 hours on some of his work and how he recorded the material. This completely blew me away! The sounds were incredible and how he recorded them was even more incredible! It felt like my objective of gaining an insight to a sound recordist’s mindset had already been achieved! If you haven’t heard of any of Jez’s work, you should listen to some of it now! Its amazing! I guess you could say that it was more towards sound art and sound design. It was mesmerisingly beautiful! In the last half an hour, Chris played a piece of his that was about an old house. He turned off the lights and we were blown away with how the visual senses were awakened through sound. It was so amazing that I realised for the first time that sound could be better than the moving picture!

The next morning was a full session from Chris about his approaches and strategies to sound recording. This covered some of the very deep questions I’d hoped would be answered. I could relate Chris’s words with how I would use sound to tell stronger stories. Later during a tea break, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that some of the same techniques I use for preproduction in film, are similar to Chris’s preproduction for sound recording. The session went into the afternoon covering microphones and sound recorders. This was really interesting because although I have some of the types of gear being presented, it had never occurred to me how else I could use them! It comes back to the age old quote, you can have the gear, but it’s how you use it that counts! I can see myself being a more capable sound recordist using the gear that I already have.

We headed out into the countryside near the venue in the afternoon. We tried various microphones and went looking for interesting things to record. I mainly used my shotgun microphone in a hand held blimp wondering about the place. Jez and Chris were on hand to help out and point people in the right direction. At one point, I listened to sound being captured using parabolic reflector which completely took me by surprise. Listening to sounds, amplified with crisp detail in a highly directional spot some distance away. Around 5pm Chris setup a stereo mic in a small opening at the edge of the woodlands. Chris discussed microphone placement and the decisions he was making, then ran a long 100 metre stereo cable back to the main presentation room in the house. It was amazing! It felt so-real to hear a live recording of the woodlands outside. It was like being in a wildlife documentary as Chris narrated what was happening outside, as the birds were coming in to roost for the evening. We listened to the whole event on a 4-speaker system. It was so immersive and beautiful. After dinner the group split up and I went with Jez to learn more about using his contact microphones. The concept of using these devices is so new to me that I wanted to know more about how to use them. We attached them to fridges, kettles, toasters, floorboards, anything that might cause some level of vibrations. A very interesting exercise! We later congregated again to listen to another one of Chris’s pieces about a garden. Again, the visual nature of the sounds was mind blowing!

The last day we were up early. We headed out to a nearby lake with lots of woodland. We travelled together in a mini-bus to this rural location. The lake was a sight of beauty. There was a single lonesome swan swimming with a misty haze hovering above the landscape. Jez brought some of his hydrophones for us to use. Unfortunately there wasn’t much activity in the waters near us, but you could hear some fish in the vicinity. Chris and Jez checked up on various people and helped with practical advice. I wondered off with another delegate into the woods. I setup a stereo microphone on a stand after we identified a suitable spot, far away from everybody else. It was amazing! I’ve never just listened before… When walking out in the woods, you usually have something on your mind and you just pass through it at a good pace. I actually “listened” to what was being recorded, putting the advice we had learned over the previous 2 days into practice. I could hear the sounds that stood out from the rest and over the course of time, I could hear the woodland changing in tone. It was beautiful and surprisingly amazing! From that very moment, I felt myself becoming more connected with the natural world. I’d say that it was a reflection point in my life… Later on as we were heading back, Chris explained a few other aspects of field recording and instead of talking about it, he took me to a remote location and showed me. Guiding me through the choices he was making. It reminded me of how important tacit knowledge is! Tacit knowledge being knowledge that cannot be learnt from written material alone. You either have to be shown or you have to find your own way of doing it. For example, you can’t learn to ride a bicycle by reading a book. If you want to record sound like Chris Watson, then you have to be with him to see how he does it. There I was having a 1-to-1 with Chris as he talked me through the various options and the pros and cons of what we were recording. Amazing!

We all headed out to a private railway station. It had been prearranged for us to have access to various parts of the site. I stayed with Jez so I could learn more about using contact microphones. He attached them to the crevices in the wooden sleepers. I setup my stereo microphones and plugged both sets of microphones into my sound recorder. Wow! The sound of a train passing was amazing! But it was even more amazing when combined with the contact microphone. It had a richness and deep rumbling to the sound. I couldn’t help it, but smile as I was recording it! Incredible! Needless to say, I purchased one of Jez’s contact mics.

After lunch we picked out some of our best recordings and played them in a group setting. Wow! It was amazing what people had recorded! Many of the recordings were made with affordable portable recording units and microphones. Again, its how you use them that is important! You don’t need thousands of pounds worth of equipment to make a good and interesting recording. The workshop sadly came to an end… but my journey has taken a new road… I now have ideas of making a series of short films about the places we live and appreciating the natural world we live in.

Quick Links
Chris Watson : http://www.chriswatson.net
Jez Riley French : https://jezrileyfrench.co.uk
WildEye Training : http://www.wildeye.co.uk

The post Wildlife Sound Recording Workshop with Chris Watson and Jez Riley French appeared first on Still River Films.