My Reflection
Being a Millennial myself who runs digital marketing agency, I am the quintessential candidate/exhibit/case-study that this overall study can be taken place on. My business relies heavily on Social Media to promote our services to the world, free of charge.
Now for a start up company with no allocated budget for marketing and advertising, using the multiple social media platforms to make our local community and the world aware of us, FREE of charge, was a pivotal process in attaining the level of exposure we currently now have. Social Media, primarily Facebook and Instagram, have allowed us to reach a wider terrain than we are normally used to. Conventional methods of marketing Such as television advertisement, are methods that many businesses cannot afford to pay for.
Enough of the technical jargon, When it came to the production of the documentary, it must be made clear that the process was some what rushed and this was majorly due to the fact that i changed my topic halfway through, which inevitably required me to start the entire process from the beginning around the end of July. Now with the experience i have with film and content production, I would back myself to shoot and edit an entire production of this magnitude in less than one week, to a very high standard. However, the only thing that I seemed to struggle with was the actual written account and documentation of the entire process. Before I chose my topic area I had to make time to study the background and history behind it. In addition, for me to present a balanced argument I must make sure that i have covered and weighted up both sides of the coin, doing as much as possible to remove any sentiment and affiliation between me and the chosen topic.
Whilst researching on the conventional methods of advertising, most of them seemed to be straight forward such as television, radio and newspapers. I began to strategise about what i actually wanted to create,, whether it would be an animated piece, a short film or a documentary. Although i hadn’t yet concluded which expression i wanted to create, the one certain thing was that I would be focusing on at least one business owner not including myself, however as time went on and i decided a documentary was the best expression to reveal this research, I decided assembling a collective group of business owners would be the best thing for me to do, especially if i wanted to ass more weight to the argument. I came up with a number of at least 4 business owners, that i would have to interview to gage their views. Now began the headache! Actually finding these business owners to interview seemed to be a problem. I had contacted a few owners directly to arrange these interviews, some would ignore my requests and many wouldn’t honour the arrangements we had made to film, leaving me stranded and loosing valuable time.
As a founder of a digital marketing company, I have the opportunity to work directly with other company bosses. Through some of the relationships that I have built overt the years with them, I was able to arrange four informal interviews over a 3 week period, between the first week on august to the third. This meant that By the time i had finished filming the interviews, I would only have a maximum of one week to complete the edit of the entire documentary and scribe the complete reflection of this research process alongside it. I really don’t and didn’t make things easy for myself.
Now it must be made clear how i actually managed to get all these interviews done with all the panellists consent. All for panellists needed my companies services at some capacity & whilst we were providing this service for them, I took it upon myself to ask them all, in my own unique way, if they would be happy to answer a few brief questions about advertising and what all their favourite methods of advertising were. Now this was definitely a ‘Hail Mary’ throw just hoping for the best possible outcome and luckily enough, all arrangements went accordingly.
Now with all that being said, The quality of answers from at least two of the panellists did not sit well well me. They did not grasp the questions that I had been asking them, therefore this led to long winded responses and a lot of off topic moments. In contrast to this, There were two panellists who grasped exactly what I was trying to achieve through this research project. They were able to articulate themselves very well and present arguments for and against why they did and did not use social platforms as stream of advertisement. One of the panellists, Michael Omoniyi, carried a high level of business intuition, which led me to carry out a more in-depth analysis on him and his business operations.
I was able to retract some valuable content from Michael which was rather bitter sweet. This extra information made up for the lack of substance provided by the other panellists and additionally allowed me to capture several cutaway shots which is always a positive. Overall this segment of the process has revealed to me that vetting/screening panellists or any sort of talent before creating a production, has to be paramount. This way you know exactly what those people are about and gives you a sample into what you can expect. I cannot really go back and reshoot the entire production again because of time, but I will definitely screen all talent from hence forth, to avoid disappointment and wasting time.
Moving on, another factor of production which could have been managed better were the choices of location. It is granted that I began production quite late for this project and this had a knock on effect on the cast/talent that elected which also had a domino effect on the locations that were used. I was reacting to scenarios rather than dictating proceedings. By establishing one fixed location to shoot the interviews, I believe it would have made the visuals of the documentary much more pleasing to the eye, due to the consistency of location, Additionally one fixed location would have allowed me to be in control of the lighting, the levels sound and other crucial aesthetics which can make or break a project of this magnitude.
The Video above breaks down the importance of Location Scouting for Your Independent Film or project. The presenter speaks in depth about what is important when choosing a location and problems that can occur. She touches upon why it is important to consider sound when it comes to choosing your location. If one of the locations you have chosen is next to a train track, but your film has character dialog, then it would clearly conflict.
Location is a crucial factor that can take your production to the level of award recognition, The piece above sheds light on how some of the most captivating films in modern history have all had locations which brought the stories to life or took them to another level.
The Editing Process
The editing stage proved to be a period of trials from the on-set. Crucial footage I had captured from one of the panellists had gone missing and I now believe i deleted thinking i already had another copy elsewhere. Such a fundamental mistake could have potentially tarnished the practical aspect of this research project, due to the fact that the footage that had been deleted contained interesting notions for and against social media advertising that i seriously wanted to reveal through this production.
This is the only remaining footage from panellist and co-director of Revive Sport ‘Hamid Addai’. If you watch the video above, it is clear to understand why i cannot solely use this clip within the final production. What he says in the clip above has nothing to do with the questions I am trying to answer. It doesn’t shed any light on social media marketing, or conventional methods of advertising, but rather motivates viewers to chase their dreams. It is a real shame that the footage was lost because as i shared above, he made some interesting points which would have tied in well with the clip of him above!
After losing that clip, it inevitably changed everything. It changed the initial approach I had to piece all the footage together, it changed the the story and narrative i was striving to create through the documentary and it ultimately changed the overall duration i had in mind for the completed edit of the documentary.
The next step I took after losing the footage, I decided to Use all the footage i had captured from another panellist to construct a documentary solely about that one person. The reason why i chose to solely focus on this person is because he offered the most value in regards to the questions that i was trying to answer. He like my self, is a millennial who runs a digital business, therefore one would believe he would know what he was talking about. With all this in mind, I decided to create a short documentary called “Millennial”. This documentary follows the journey of Michael Omoniyi, as he plots to raise £100,000 for his start-up company “The Common Sense Network” using Social media and other digital streams. I encountered some interesting views from Michael as he shed light on how tricky it is to run a digital News Platform, but eluded to the factors that drove him to develop such a concept.
The software I used to edit this project was final cut pro. The overall length for the draft video was 6 minutes 19 seconds, which could change depending on whether things are added or removed from the film. I chose to use Final Cut Pro 10 (FCP X) due to the fluidity and extra effects it offered me to make sure that my visuals stood out. Furthermore with the varying range shots that i had gathered for Michael, I decided to experiment with the edit and make it into a ‘vlog’ styled video, similar to that of Gary Vaynerchuk.
Vaynerchuk’s Videos are daily documentations of his life in business.
This is the first draft of my final project Titled ‘Millennial’. I have decided to call the documentary by this tile because it relates perfectly well to the narrative of the piece. A young man born in the 21st century, who has launched a Digital News outlet birthed to to take on and break the status quo of how conventional news is presented to the world. The word Millennial doesn’t only fit the documentary well, but it epitomises the subject Michael very well. An ambitious twenty something, born in the social tech revolution.
The hashtag is a key unit used on social media platforms for a few reasons. Firstly it reveals to your audience the focus of your statement and secondly once the hashtag symbol is placed infant of a word, it automatically transforms that word into a clickable link, that will lead your audience into a community of people who are also talking about the same thing. Television stations such as BBC and ITV incorporate the hashtag symbols in their programs, this is so the audience will use that hashtagged word on social media to generate a conversation about that particular show or event,
There is a purpose behind why there are clips graded in black and white. I recollect the first time that i watched 12 angry men, although it was in black and white, it made me focus more on the story of the film and how each charter carried themselves. Overall it made me engage more with the film because i had to dig deeper and forget about the visuals and any effects. This is the same experience I want to recreate for the audience of my documentary. That they will assess beyond the visuals & soak up the value being given to them.
Although I had footage from other panelists, I did not use them because focusing on Michael alone, makes the documentary look more professional and pleasant on the eye.
The footage above reveals a clip of the panellists i deliberately chose not to use. The first speaker in the clip above (The Female) does really go into much depth about which advertising channel she and her partner uses, in comparison to Michael, who goes into thorough depth about it all. The second panellist in the video (The Male) revealed to us more valuable information than the lady, however as mentioned above, I Chose not to use his segment because i wanted to keep the constancy throughout my final piece, both visually and in terms of the value their giving.
After managing to salvage something out of the footage I had, It was a blessing in disguise as it made me think quickly on my feet in regards what the next course of action was. The ‘Millennial’ Documentary I believe is a visual answer to the point I have been trying to make throughout this project. Which is “How to effectively use Social Media to market your business”. The Video itself is a tool of visual advertising, It is created to not only promote the the persons product or service but it also doubles down as a form of propaganda when Michael pleads with viewers to contribute towards the fundraising campaign for his company. Social media users rarely want to read anymore. Its purpose is to inform you and entice you.
We are visual creatures who want to watch things as opposed to reading. This is how we consume informative data and this why companies such as Facebook have acquired photo & video sharing platform ‘Instagram’. They understand that peoples attentions are swayed by visual motions and a large majority of the worlds population live on their mobile devices. We may not all appreciate being bombarded with online commercials and unskipabble adverts whilst browsing the web, but small scale businesses and startups must realise that there are only a few practical and affordable methods of getting your business seen by potential consumers global, and that is through quality, disruptive, visual marketing. Executed and streamed through social media. It is the cheapest and must effective method to engage your consumer.
What do I mean by Disruptive?
For the audience and potential Consumer to be drawn to your advert, you must have something there to entice them. That old adage that count be true enough and that is one predominant method used to entice people to watch adverts, however like the image above, having an open ended question accompanied with an intense image, is also something that would draw audience attention.
Disruptive simply means doing something outside of the norm and this method along with half naked women or extremely bright colours, are ploys of disruptive marketing used by tech companies who also understand the psychology behind getting human attention.
Simple but Disruptive
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