The Big Picture.

I just closed it up with a group that I have been doing business with for the last four years. I have decided to forego “one off” businesses that think of video production like sending out for pizza. It’s a check box-catch all-cya, that is a nice to have instead of a must have. Pity.

They load sometimes hours and hours of head nodding meandering technical “hey, if you couldn’t make the meetings” into a cyber void and call it “mission accomplished”. “Hey, we may as well”.

Some of this stuff is valuable, very valuable, strategic and worthy of an NDA or confidentiality agreement. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve offered to sign one many times but they just wave me off. I guess video is not the same as being there.

My usual interaction is with someone they deem “event planners” who are actually administrative assistants and are usually way out of the loop when it comes to how an event should be covered and what’s critically important.

Any ideas outside the box, or improvisational approaches, that could enhance, not up sell, the production, befuddled them and was sometimes met with confusion, stress and anxiety. And anger. So I try to keep it simple instead of asking if I can speak to mommy or daddy.

Some of these companies hire kids right out of schools that major in TV broadcasting and think they’ve got their multimedia end covered. This is where they find out the difference between a videographer and a video producer.

They assign them to work with me on projects because of their perceived grasp of the technical end. Well, they might fit in down at the local cable company, but they certainly didn’t get a real world education of the big picture. Hope they didn’t take out a hefty student loan.

I had a kid right out of Hofstra University who used to oversleep an 11:00 am shoot. He could offload footage and focus a camera but we always had to keep an eye on him. There’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears in his future.

I recently had someone e-mail me and ask if they could get us to shoot a “quick” video of the CEO out to the troops because he travels so frequently and he needs some face time with his peeps. This was on a Friday morning, so before responding, I called around to one of my guys to see if he could get into town that afternoon. He said he could and I told him to stand by. I got back to her and said we could do it that afternoon before the CEO left for the west coast.

She got back to me and said they wanted his video shot in two months, when he was back in town. Guess he didn’t need that much face time.

If you have any questions or need advice, please feel free to reach out to me here.

Bob O’Hearn
508-517-6714
bob@doubleocreative.com