In the week leading up to Ignite Portland 5, I worked on producing two 30-second sponsor videos: one for Open Source Bridge and one for CubeSpace. Sponsor videos at Ignite Portland are an interesting concept that allow our sponsors to talk to the audience in a short, controlled fashion. Think of TV ads, but without much of a production budget.
I'm posting about the CubeSpace video first since it was shown early in the set of videos, while people were still taking their seats from intermission, and our various inane comments weren't very audible.
The Video
Our Strange Little Process
Eva contacted me on Friday morning: "Need to make Ignite sponsor video by Monday. Help. Please." Had this been any other day that week, the evening would have brought crowds of happy geeks flocking to the many user group meetings and events that CubeSpace hosts but, as it was, no geek confluence was scheduled until after the video was due.
We wanted to capture a sense of the kind of fun conversation and interaction that goes on at CubeSpace on a daily basis, so we sat down Friday afternoon and started to record some audio. The original concept was to have a semi-structured conversation that just happened to include bits about all of the great services that CubeSpace offers. This fell apart quickly. Instead, we ended up recording 35 minutes of Eva, Igal, Shane, Schwern, Kendra, and me talking about the video and many other things.
We ended up splicing together tiny chunks of this epic recording to make the final audio track and overlaying it on some still images and titles that I put together in iMovie. After using Final Cut for the Open Source Bridge video, I found iMovie incredibly counterintuitive.
The video doesn't try to be a hard marketing piece. It wouldn't translate to a TV audience, or to people who hadn't heard of CubeSpace before, but I think it serves its intended purpose: revealing a bit about what makes CubeSpace a great place to be.
A Few Highlighted Outtakes
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- A bit of an introduction to our team
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- Our first take, explaining our lack of geeks
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- Talk of a much longer video
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- A fax tone
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- Discussion of the reception area vortex
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- Misinterpretation of the "Rent a Coder" services
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- An alternate video idea
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- Attempts to record Igal's two-day-a-week membership song
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- A review of snack food
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- An A-Z list of alcoholic beverages
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One Comment (comment feed)
I especially enjoyed the A-Z listing of (some dubious)
alcoholic quaffs! makes one want to sing drinking songs with the stein held high!