How To Look Good For Video Conferences

Web conferences are the new normal and all of us are bound to need to collaborate over Skype, Zoom, Gotomeeting etc over the coming weeks/months. This vlog from Dead Ready Director Chris Tongue, offers three tips on how to make sure that you stream/webcast yourself clearly – and look good doing it!

Transcript below:

Hi. With most of us working from home now and all events and meetings taking place online, it’s important to not only know how to look good in a web conference, but to also make sure that you can be clearly seen and understood. This counts double for anybody who is used to presenting at a large scale event, where there might be a whole technical team there to make sure you’re both lit beautifully and can be heard very clearly by everybody in the room.

Online, you’re going to have to get used to being your own technical team, but fortunately, the essentials are pretty easy to get right. So here are three tips on how to look good for video conferencing.

Tip 1.

It’s essential to get your light source falling on your face, to make sure you don’t appear as a silhouette, so make sure you don’t shoot with your back towards a window. Natural light is often most flattering, so try to set your camera up underneath a window, where the light from outside can illuminate your whole face. This isn’t possible for everyone, it’s not possible for me, so alternatively, to increase the light on your face, consider just putting in a household lamp behind the camera. It really does make a massive difference.

Tip 2.

Poor quality audio is arguably worse than poor quality visuals as people have a far lower tolerance for content they can’t hear. Most laptops have built-in microphones, which are usually pretty good these days, but just remember that the further you are away from your laptop the worse the sound quality will be. I’m shooting this video with a professional microphone that I happened to have in the house when the lockdown was announced but your laptop microphone is usually ok. I would just consider buying one of these options if you’re going to be doing this on a regular basis.

Tip 3.

This one isn’t the most important, but a standard approach is to put yourself in the middle of the frame, with a little bit of your shoulders showing. It’s also a good idea to try to keep your camera at eye level, because shooting from a low angle is pretty unflattering.

Remember also to have a look at what you’re capturing in the background to make sure that you’re not capturing anything sensitive, personal or embarrassing. Neutral backgrounds are usually a safe bet, but just try not to put yourself right up against a wall, because it’ll make you look like you live in a broom cupboard.

So there you go, three simple tips to make sure that you represent yourself clearly in a video conference and look great doing it.

Stay safe. We’ll see you next time.

How To Plan Promo Videos For Maximum Engagement

Promo videos often have a lot of information to deliver. Whether you’re using them to launch a product or to promote your business as a whole, you’re probably under pressure to pack in lots of brand messaging and the risk is that you fall into the trap of talking AT your audience.

This severely undermines engagement, so the way to avoid it and to keep the audience focussed on your content, is to not only think about what you’re saying, but HOW you’re saying it.

Here are a few approaches to make sure you’re not only delivering your messaging, but that you’re giving your audience what they want.

Be Slick

Being slick isn’t about being too clever, its about disciplined execution. Cut down on any unnecessary repetitions, pauses or hesitations to keep up the pace of your video and make sure you give it the required rehearsal time.

Consider adding a visual hook which delivers pretty standard corporate messaging, while the one-shot approach takes the audience a visual ride.

Be Impressive

Video is an innovative area of technology and new production approaches are popping up all the time, many of which are available to relatively low production budgets.

If you move fast you can take advantage of the novelty value of augmented reality, 360 filming or aerial footage to to wow your audience with something they’ve not seen before.

Make Us Feel Something

There’s research that suggests that marketing on functions and features can increase the perceived benefits of your brand by 21% which isn’t bad, but if you tap into something emotive, the bump could be more like 42%.

Whether you’re making your audience laugh or tugging at the heartstrings, emotive scripts benefit from having a focussed creative vision.

So, assign script writing responsibility to your most talented writer (or engage a pro script-writer), give them plenty of rope and protect them from interference from elsewhere in the business.

Embrace Metaphors

Finally, I wanted to share an example of a promo video we produced for software platform Jaggaer One.

Knowing the complexity of their product would be difficult to explain literally in a few short minutes, the client embraced the idea of featuring a visual metaphor to quickly communicate the value of the platform.

Presenting the gymnast on the pommel horse at the beginning gave the audience something unexpected to kick off the video and kept them engaged, before easing them into the specific benefits of the product.

The key to a successful promo is to excite your audience; inspire them with a vision of how their future could be if they were to reap the benefits of your offering. If you know your customer and you never lose site of what they want, you can’t go wrong. Good luck!

If you would like to discuss how Dead Ready Productions could help you to further enjoy the benefits of video for your business, please get in touch via the button below or by calling +44 (0)208 339 6139.

Contact Us

Introducing Hollie Our Graphic Designer

This week we’re really pleased to be welcoming our newest member of the team, Hollie Coote!

Hollie brings with her a wealth of graphic design experience, from the disciplined, corporate style she developed at Hertz, to the child-focussed packaging designs created at Galla Trading. We’re particularly looking forward to applying her skills to the animated videos we produce, adding that extra polish to propel our production values to the next level.

Having been on the lookout for a while, we’re really excited to have found Hollie and can’t wait to get her started on the diverse range of client and internal projects we have in the pipeline.

So welcome to the team Hollie, you’re going to be busy!

Understanding Your View Count

Is a video’s view count the most important measure of success?

Mike Plenty, Dead Ready Productions Managing Director, demystifies this powerful metric in the vlog above.

Checkout the transcript below:

Hi, today’s video blog is about understanding the view count of your video. When it comes to judging the performance of videos, view count tends to be the most popular metric, and it’s easy to see why:

• It’s the most visible measurement, clearly shown on most platforms
• It’s easy to make sense of
• It can generate some impressive number

But looking at view count alone is a risky way to assess how well your video is performing, for a few key reasons.

Firstly, the view count itself doesn’t tell you anything about who your audience are. You may have 500,000 views on your latest video release, but if those views are all occurring in New Zealand and your target market is the UK, then you probably need to re-evaluate how to reach your audience.

Secondly, viewing numbers aren’t the same as viewer retention. If those 500,000 people are on average only watching 5% of the video, the vast majority of your content isn’t being seen.

Thirdly, it’s important to remember that different social media channels measure views in different ways. As an example, on Facebook if your video autoplays on someone’s feed for 3 seconds or more, you’ve gained a view. But on YouTube, the viewer has to initiate playback and play a minimum % of the video before a view is counted.

For this reason, it’s easier to achieve high view counts on Facebook than YouTube. There are different criteria for other social networks too, so it’s important to be aware of that before assuming that one of them simply performs much better for you than the others.

So if view count is a flawed measurement, is it effectively useless? Well no – but it’s best to think of it as a starting point when analysing video success; a headline figure that needs breaking down before drawing any conclusions. It’s like the turnover of your business, when what you really need to know is profit.

Combining view count with other metrics allows you to make sense of the numbers, and understand what’s working and what isn’t when it comes to production and distribution of your content. And it starts right from the beginning when setting goals for your video – by all means, incorporate viewing figures into these, but know the limitations and be aware that these numbers alone are not a measure of success.

So that wraps up our brief overview of viewer count. Until next time – like our Facebook page or subscribe for more, and share this video to help us boost our view count!

The Importance Of Quality Audio

As a video production agency, you’d be forgiven for thinking that 100% of our attention is on the creation of dynamic and engaging visuals for businesses, but the truth is that audio is every bit as important.

This was highlighted for me recently when Dead Ready partnered with the Sick of Health Podcast and for the first time, produced media that didn’t contain any visuals at all!

If you’re a marketeer, the chances are that you’ll need to produce media to feed your content campaigns, so this recent experience led to thinking that you might might be interested in some brief tips around audio recording.

There’s very little that can be done to improve poorly recorded audio, in the same way as there’s not much you can do to save out-of-focus visuals, so whether you’re producing your own vlog, shooting an interview or recording someone speaking in any context, make sure you think about audio, just as much as you think about the visuals.

We recorded Sick of Health in a purpose-built (if not quite finished) studio in London where Dead Ready supplied the appropriate microphones and recording equipment. This was a bit of a challenge as although the studio was sound-proofed, the three presenters were all in the same space, meaning that although I’d mic’d them all up individually with personal radio mics, every mic would pick up every voice to a lesser or greater extent.

This was a bit of a shame, as I was hoping to be able to edit each voice in isolation, balancing the audio levels for a perfect mix afterwards, but this level of precision is rare to achieve and not normally something you need to worry about when producing content for your campaigns.

Ideally, you’d want to put each speaker in a separate space, where they can hear (through headphones) and see each other (through glass or a screen). This wasn’t an option for us, so we might as well have used a single mic and ensured that each speaker was equal distance away.

Being close to the microphone is essential to record quality audio, so no matter the value of your mic, make sure your subject is as close as possible and make sure you do a test recording to check the quality. If you hear any distortion or buzzing when people speak loudly, don’t move the mic away; instead, reduce the sensitivity of your recording device.

If you’re recording into a phone or similar device, the mic sensitivity will probably be controlled automatically, but doing a test recording and listening back is the best way to be sure.

We really enjoyed the being part of the Sick of Health experience and found it a really well-researched and entertaining listen, so check it out here.

The latest episode on immunotherapy went up this week, and the other episodes are all worth a listen as well. I personally found the episode on the woman who could smell Parkinsons particularly fascinating!