I’ve been working with video for the last 15 years, before which I was, supposedly, an actor. Occasionally that meant I got paid money to appear on video, so really I’ve been around video for a years before that. Let’s call it 25 years.
In that time the landscape has changed dramatically.
My first film was shot on vhs where I made a fake hairspray advert, claiming that I had invented a potion that could create hair growth. This involved spraying deodorant on my good friend Scot’s bald head and then doing a cutaway to my Grandmothers‘ head, which was live lip-synced to Scot saying ‘Look at my hair now’ in some peculiar before and after type shot.
This was edited by connecting 2 vhs players together in my bedroom with scart leads and copying one vhs tape on to another. It was most likely a dreadful edit but it was the first I ever did and made people laugh.
I didn’t have the right equipment but the net result was something that people enjoyed watching and I had created the entire thing from scratch.
Jump forward 25 years and, while I now have the equipment at my disposal, not much has actually changed. I write stuff, I shoot it, I edit it, I now mess about with some vfx when necessary and people watch it and generally enjoy it.
What’s interesting is how frequently I ‘get away with it’.
You may think this is a weird thing to say. It’s not.
Not many of my business clients have got the budget to film in Pinewood studios with a crew of fifty people and Michel Roux junior doing the catering, and I’m alright with that because I learned my skills the hard way.
I didn’t have access to equipment while I was learning, so I made do with what I had and made it work. The more experience I got the more equipment I could be around and learn how to use and I could use these skills to improve the films I put out but the best thing is that no matter how big the clients budget, the request was always to maximise the budget and the more I have filmed the more I have learned and the more I have learned to creatively achieve on a budget.
The budget is NEVER enough. Ever.
Not because I’m expensive or crew are expensive but because as creatives we always want to strive for the best, we want to achieve the spectacular and in order to do that we always have to think creatively to get the best results.
You’d be amazed what can be achieved just by talking to me or someone like me (don’t take my word for it have a look at my testimonials www.holomedia.co.uk/corporate-commercial )
A client didn’t think they could afford video for the social media pages recently and instead put out something that a sales rep filmed on his iPhone as they believed it was better than nothing. In my opinion bad video is worse than no video, it tells your customers that you’re happy to be just ‘ok’ and that you don’t really have pride in your business.
Give me a call, you’d be amazed what we can create together.