Watershed PR is running an immersive session in online video production at this year’s Like Minds Exeter event in October.
Our session will combine theory, hands-on, face-to-face practice, stories, analysis and discussion. It will range widely over many subjects, probably including the ancient arts of rhetoric, the uses of beer, boxing, blinks, sex, death, violence, framing, gorillas, curiosity, multi-modal literacy, shopping, the effects of memorising, and wheels.
All these things are – we promise you – relevant. You’ll learn why you should bother with online video in the first place and how it will help your PR, marketing and SEO. The main thrust of the session will be practical, with many useful tips to help you produce videos that people will want to watch and share.
We will look creating a better understanding of your brand’s identity so that you know what messages and characteristics you should aim to express. We will discuss ways of finding the stories and the people best placed to bring a product or a company to life on screen.
A series of enjoyably simple exercises will show what genuine engagement looks like and sounds like. How long should you hold shots for when filming? Should you move the camera? How should you move the camera? If people are talking, where they should look? How should their voices be recorded? When editing, how long should shots be? How do you know when to cut from shot to shot?
We will look particularly at the director Alexander Mackendrick’s idea of the Invisible Imaginary Ubiquitous Winged Witness. The Witness is ‘a strange disembodied and mythic creature… oblivious to real space and time’ but we’ll discuss what lessons this inquisitive beast has for modern businesses, particularly in relation to the Like Minds 2011 Exeter conference themes of Innovation and Opportunity.
Detailed analysis and comparison of videos will suggest what works, what doesn’t and why. Throughout this whole session, we will want to call upon people’s own experiences and views. Some of our own videos will be critiqued, and we will reveal some of the motivations and techniques that went into making them.
Bring a smartphone, and, if possible, a small object that doesn’t have much monetary value but holds some personal significance for you. We’re also planning to set up a YouTube channel just for this session. If you know you’re going to attend, email jonathan@watershedpr.co.uk or stephen@watershedpr.co.uk for more details of how we can all prepare for a memorable afternoon.
Like Minds Exeter is being held 19-21 October, see http://wearelikeminds.com/events/exeter for further details.
Jonathan Hudston
