December | 2009 | Blog – Good Lizard Media

Creating Video Content

Video content is a brilliant way for an artist to engage themselves with their audience. Enabling the artist to speak directly to their fans and to be more creative and insightful than is possible with just text…

This is a quick blog to take you through some of the different ways you can create and use video content:

Susan Boyle – Answers Fans’ Questions:

Here we see Susan Boyle answering questions that are sent in by her fans.

There have been 30 to 40 of these videos posted online over about a 4 to 5 week period. The footage has obviously all been shot in one go, with someone asking her each question in turn. The video has then been edited down into individual questions, lasting between 15 and 45 seconds. The person asking the question has been replaced with a static frame of the questions text itself.

This is a great example of making the most of the limited time that the artist has to create content. By planning the content and questions in advance the artist has been able to spend 45 minutes in front of camera and in turn created over a month’s worth of regularly update video content.

By asking the fans to send their own questions in, it looks like Susan cares about her fans and is willing to actually converse with them.

Manchester Orchestra – Video Podcast

This is a 7 minute video featuring a mixture of behind the scenes, artful footage and live video.

This video is not only up on the bands Youtube channel but is also available as a video podcast series from the iTunes music store for free. This video podcast series is updated roughly once a month.

The footage has been carefully and creatively edited. In comparison to the Susan Boyle footage above for example, this has taken much longer to bring together. Hence we see that these videos are only released about once a month.

Where the Susan Boyle footage is more about informing and updating fans, this video content is much more an extension of the bands own creative output. These videos form part of the Manchester Orchestra experience, both in the effort that has gone into the editing process, the featuring of good quality live video and the access to the artist behind the scenes.

Master Shortie – Quick update

Master Shortie goes into HMV and buys his new album. The footage is intended as a call-to-arms for his fans to go out and buy his new album.

This artist uses video regularly, partly we would assume because of the young demographic of his fanbase. In order to keep turning out content quickly there is very little editing involved in this video, with just three or four cuts in the whole video. The camera work is very rough and the audio quality isn’t particularly good either, but this actually works to the benefit of the content. It appears the video is being made by a friend of Master Shortie and is akin to the sort of video content young people take of each other when out and about. By having the video content like this, it is both quick to get up online and relates to the audience arguably better than well filmed high quality video would.

In order to get the required video footage done in a short time like this and with only a few cuts necessary, there needs to be some good planning beforehand. The artist needs to know what topics need to be covered and to be aware of any important information and dates that need to be included in their performance.

…

These three different methods of creating video content are all quite different, but this does not mean that an artist could not use all three. The most important questions when getting video content created are:

What is the artist comfortable doing?

What do you want to achieve with the content?

How soon does it need to be up online?

By answering these questions and planning the content you want to create, you can use any of the three examples of different content creation above or any other creative ways to film fantastic and engaging video content.

Posted by David on 17 Dec, 2009

Creating a clickable picture

Pete and I ran the first AIM Digital Day recently, which is a day of training and instruction on digital marketing and retail for independent labels and artists in the UK.

One of the most often asked question during the day was ‘How exactly do we do that?’ especially in relation to embedding and html in general. So here’s a quick guide to embedding a picture as a clickable link into any site which allows you to input html.

The basic html is:

Where X is the URL you want to link to, for example http://www.ticketmaster.com/brixtonacademy/myband.html or http://www.myspace.com/myband

This must include the http:// at the start of the URL as above.

And Y is the hosted image file that you want to use, for example:

http://www.photobucket.com/myband/flyer1.jpg

This gives you a piece of html that looks like this:

This is very basically how to make a clickable image.

But if you want to go a little further you could enable your fans to put this onto their own Myspace profile or website etc, to really start virally pushing out the image and link.

By using another little piece of html code you can make, for example, a gig flyer that you have put onto your Myspace also display the html that fans need to embed it on their own page, right underneath the flyer.

This may look complicated but it is in fact fairly straight forward once you try it a few times:

This will produce you an eflyer plus a text box with a white background and black text containing the html that fans need to embed it onto their own page.

Here’s how it works:

This is your original eflyer:

Then add in the following at the end of the flyer html code:

First change “290” as this sets the width of the box. This should be the same as the width of the flyer. To find out the width (in pixels) find the wherever the image is stored on your computer and either right-click (windows only) the file or hover your mouse over it to see the dimensions which will be something like 300 x 400, where 300 is the width and 400 the height.

You then replace 290 with 300 to set the width of the box. Then we need to replace the X at the end of the piece of code with the embed code for the flyer. This is what the fan will be able to copy and then embed onto their own site/social network.

We need to make sure that the code we put in underneath doesn’t just show as the flyer again, as if we were just to paste the same code in again for the eflyer it would just end up showing twice.

So take the eflyer embed code,

and replace all occurrences of the following characters:

< replace with <

> replace with >

“ replace with "

<a href="http://www.myspace.com/myband" < >img src="http://www.photobucket.com/myband/flyer1.jpg" > </a>

Then simply replace the X with this modified text

Then copy and paste the whole thing into wherever you like, Myspace or Website etc.

Posted by David on 13 Dec, 2009

Creating Video Content

Creating a clickable picture

Archives