Posts Tagged video advertising
Incorporating Beautiful Imagery Into A Corporate Video
Posted by SEO Services in Video Production on July 20th, 2010
Beauty is one of the important elements, which needs to be incorporated into a corporate video. Beauty is a quality which imbues an object with attractiveness. In the same way as viewers are attracted to unique content, viewers are also attracted to beautiful content. Finding beautiful content to present to the public is a unique challenge for every industry, because each industry has beauty in a different form. Locating the beauty and presenting it, will greatly enhance the appeal of a corporate video to the public.
Finding that which is beautiful in a given industry is a unique challenge for every company making a corporate video. The source of the beauty is not always so obvious.In a company, which provides large above ground containers for volatile fuel, for example, a photo of the production plant with row after row of these large steely containers sitting in a lot waiting to be delivered has beauty in symmetry. A video made for an environmental group, has a much more obvious source of beauty, and it will serve to prove my point.
The environmental corporate video by Edward Wallace can be found at http://vimeo.com/3217927 . The Canadian environmental protection organization that produced this video has a very conspicuous source of beauty. It is important to point out, this corporate video has not merely thrown beautiful scenes into the video, to attract attention. The beauty of untrammeled nature relates directly to the purpose of their organization, which is to preserve these wild pristine places. This is essential. The video is not merely throwing in beautiful images to attract views so that it can then deliver the message. Rather, in a very real sense, the beauty is the message. In that sense, and in this usage the video illustrates the famous poetic adage that “Beauty is Truth and Truth is Beauty.”
The incorporation of beauty into a corporate video, may not always be done so appropriately. For example, if a mountain climber reaches the summit of a tall mountain, and a video captures exquisite footage of a snow capped mountain summit, a breath-taking panorama and the perilous drop below, there is certainly beauty within the segment. However, that beauty is not intrinsically related to the wrist watch which has continued to tick despite the rugged trek to the mountain peak. The sturdiness of the watch, in fact, is one of its minor feature compared to the beautiful intricacy of its dials, wheels and or digital circuitry, which never miss a beat and keep accurate time for years.
In the wrist watch video, we see that the primary beauty of the mountain summit has been transferred to the primary object of the video, the watch, even though it is not beauty that intrinsically belongs to the watch. Such a tactic can work at times, but it can also backfire as the viewer is secretly thinking, “You mean you have nothing intrinsically beautiful about your product to show me?”
On the other hand, when the featured beauty and the message of the video line up together, as we see in the environmental video, then the beauty and message work to strengthen each other and enhance the effectiveness of the video. The beautiful imagery, furthermore, imbues the video with a certain degree of sincerity and even passion. People watching the images of the environmental are moved to want to save the environment as they see the morning sunlight glistening through the trees, and here birds singing their morning songs and watch as a herd of elks standing shyly in a broad shallow creek, turn to look, with mild concern, at the humans filming them from a distance.
The 4Ward Corporate Video.
Posted by SEO Services in Video Production on July 15th, 2010
4Ward is a Canadian company specializing in branding, web video production and photography. Their 2008 corporate video is posted on the web. The video features background music consisting of the full sound track of the song “Here it Goes Again,” by OK.
The song is an exciting song, which won real prominence because of the incredible viral video made to the tune of that song. The video features the band members performing an incredible walk dance on a series of treadmills in a gymnasium. The treadmills are lined up in two rows and set to run in alternating directions. As the band members walk/dance from treadmill to treadmill, to the tune of the music, they create some incredible visual effects. The visual effects illustrate the theme of the song as well. In the song, the protagonist is always getting in the groove and in the mood, with a girl, apparently, when something outside of his control occurs. Treadmills, like life, never stop moving and make it impossible to merely stand still. In that regard they illustrate the theme of the song that something always seems to happens when life is going along great.
The choice of Here it Goes Again, as background music for their corporate video apparently reflects the company’s esprit de corp. Videography manufacturing is a fast paced business. Just when one project is under control, the phone rings and another project comes along. The pace never stops and people working in videography on online marketing are constantly busy, but constantly loving it.
Both the theme of faced paced activity and at the same time adaptability and ability to go along with the flow are expressed in the video background song. While the song laments the fact that
something always goes out of control, just when things are going great, the song response is an dutiful and upbeat accpetance, “Oh well, here we go again.”
The visual display is collage style, with lots of images, many related to computers and communication, coming and going in multiple simultaneous frames. The work held together stylistically and is loosely held together by occasional captions. The captions tell us the company has 40 branches throughout Canada.
If the videographers gave thought to audience they are trying to target, I would assume they targeted people like their successful clients and especially clients with whom they have a good ongoing relationship, people like themselves, people who are comfortable in a rapid environment of computers, videos, photography, design and online advertising. As a corporate video the work shows off the ability of the company to create motion graphics. The captions note that the company makes flash, 3D animation, print design, package design and web design.
People who are familiar with the images used in the musical collage will probably relate to this video the best. Much of the material presents products of desktop publishing, including photographs, text designs and online arragnements. Other segments present clips of videos made for important clients such as Yamaha.
As a viewer, if asked how the company could better the production of their corporate video for future years, I would suggest using a song that is slightly less domineering. It is a tune that is so popular on You Tube, that anyone hearing it immediately wants to see the viral video that goes with it. The meaning of the song appears to express the pace of life of the industry, and that is captivating and amusing. On the other hand, I would want the video to focus a bit more on the storyline itself. I would want to see a bit more coherence and correspondence between the images and the script. However, it is worthy of note that the video has been popular, as corporate videos on You Tube go, with over 25,000 views. And that’s a lot more views than many very coherent looking corporate branding videos get.
One must concede that this video has presented a successful branding image of the company, based on the song and the content of the video collage. This helps to defend the company’s assertion that they are specialists in branding.These are people who know how to live and breathe in the fast paced Internet video and web marketing environment. And in the computer world, we tend to trust faced paced people. People who can make it have fun from 4 until 10, as the song describes, and then shrug off a sudden unexpected event, which ends the good time, and then go with the flow, are the kind of people we know we can trust with a marketing project.
