Landry Communications

The barriers to entry have essentially disappeared in many creative fields. Anyone can self-publish a book and have it printed on demand. Desktop publishing is easy to get into. And in video, what used to cost tens of thousands of dollars can now be done with a good HD camera, a Macbook Pro, and Final Cut.

This is a good thing, mostly, but it makes it hard for clients and professionals to find one another. How does a client know whether to go with an established production house or a kid with a camera? How does the professional differentiate her work from the commodity-level stuff that barely gets the job done?

I do most of my video production in collaboration with DDC International, because Colby Gottert and his team are obsessed with quality and know how to tell a story. Watch the first 1:25 of this video by DDC and join me for a discussion below.

Did you see that? From the opening shot, they’ve established a movie-like quality to the piece. In a lot of videos like this, you’re watching the talking head. Here, we see dramatic, staged shots of the subjects while hearing them speak. It draws us in. We want to know more. If you’ve only watched that first 1:25, I’m pretty sure you’re going to want to watch the rest.

Technically, the work is beautifully done. For example, we’re used to seeing a shallow depth of field, with a nicely out-of-focus background, in film, but in video it takes special equipment to pull it off. Does it matter? Well, most viewers aren’t going to comment on it, but the overall impression of quality and attention to aesthetics will subtly, even subconsciously, make the piece more memorable.

This kind of work doesn’t just happen. It’s the result of great pre-production work, in which the whole story is planned in detail; outstanding technical skills paired with top-quality gear; and creative editing grounded in a particular vision of how words and images can be used together to great effect.

If you’re a client, make sure you know what you want. People are tired of promotional videos that are all about the company or product instead of the viewer. Don’t make one. Tell a story. Tell your unique story, the one that makes it clear who you are, what you stand for, and what you do.

When choosing a producer, make sure you watch their body of work. Is it great or just good enough? I often find that the price differential between great and good is pretty minor. Your biggest investment, most likely is going to be your time. What’s on the line is the clarity of your brand. I imagine the Stewardship Foundation, the client for whom the video above was made, is proud every time someone new sees their video.

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My friend, dentist-blogger-novelist Rick Wilson, has a nice post about what he calls micro-eras: those moments in our lifetimes when some small thing is passing out of favor.

We had a beloved independent video store in Northampton, Mass. that finally closed, staffed by amazing people – a city councilman, a musician – who worked there for years. I made a video about it that I put out to the community as a gift, and I was amazed by how much people appreciated it: it’s been shared on Facebook more than 4,000 times, so I imagine it’s been seen by many times the number Youtube is reporting. A number of people told me they were moved to tears even as they laughed.

It’s so important to recognize the things we value as times change. Yes, newspapers made from dead trees don’t make “sense” any more, but the idea of them is still extraordinarily powerful and evocative: we remember our parents reading them over breakfast, we think of the death announcements of loved ones we saw in them, and we feel the collective stories they’ve held, of wars and assassinations, in a different way than we do the same news online. Do they make sense as a business model? Probably not the way they have. But that doesn’t mean it’s irrational to mourn their passing.

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I got a request for some samples of slides we’ve made relating to sustainability.

You can click on this link and then click through the slides.
Landry sample slides

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I’ve been working with the very smart Mitch Anthony on a client proposal this week. Mitch and I preach transparency and authenticity, and in that spirit we included a statement about what we value and why we seek out the clients we do. I thought I’d share it.

We believe we have an open window right now through which we can radically change the ways we live in relation to the planet and one another.

We see that people around the world are eagerly embracing new tools of collaboration and learning to take effective, collective action.

We see great potential in the social web as a means of creating true connection and sharing stories and information of great value.

We are deeply encouraged by the new tools – systems thinking, multi-stakeholder work, the U Process – that allow groups to do work that radically transforms themselves and the world.

All of this draws us to work with clients who are expressing their authentic human gifts in ways that make the world a better place.

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Jim Olsen of Signature Sounds pointed out to me recently that the video we made for them of Eilen Jewell has been seen by more than 40,000 of her fans. We did everything but the grainy effect, which was added in Nashville. I think they maybe went a little heavy on it, myself, but it’s still fun to watch.

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I love a lot of things about my work. But one of the great pleasures is meeting, and often interviewing, extraordinary people. Or, really, ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Because, as Seth Godin keeps reminding us, we’re all geniuses. It’s just a question of whether or not we will break free of the fear and convention that keep us in line, unwilling to risk following the path we’re being called to follow.

I find that everyone we interview has something brilliant to say. Here’s a short clip from an interview we did with Tucson teacher Samantha Sims at Camp Snowball (a conference about systems thinking in the schools sponsored by the Waters Foundation and others) in July. In fact, this is a bit of what Sam had to say while we were still setting the lights and sound levels. But it’s well worth watching, because she very quickly gets to the heart of great teaching, which is the willingness to be authentic and vulnerable.

The whole interview rocks, and I’m looking forward to sharing more soon.

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Five or six years ago it seemed clear to me that we invented the internet out of our hive mind because our collective intelligence knew we needed it to save the world. We needed to spread new ideas when, for example, a young man like William Kamkwamba of Malawi makes a wind-powered generator from old bike parts.

There’s no question that this is what we’re seeing around the globe now as ordinary people wake up and take responsibility for changing what’s gone wrong and use the web to act collectively. In the 1960s, protestors at the Democratic National Convention chanted “The whole world is watching” as the police used excessive force, but it wasn’t really true in the way it is now. Just ask the New York City cop who casually maced peaceful young women in the face: the whole world really is watching now.

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The execution of Troy Davis got me thinking yesterday about a story that had a very big impact on me as a white person living in an unjust world.

I was at a museum conference a number of years ago and heard a man speak. I don’t know his name. He was a Native American man and a university dean, and he told this story.

He was in a faculty meeting, and another dean was saying they were “going to get scalped” in the upcoming budget and needed to “circle the wagons.”

He left after the meeting and was walking back to his office when a colleague, a white man, came running up to catch him.

“Didn’t you hear what she said?” the colleague asked, excitedly. “Why didn’t you say something?”

The man stopped walking and looked at his friend.

“I’m tired, man,” he said. “Why didn’t you say something?”

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David Whyte writes in his poem “Loaves and Fishes”:

People are hungry
and one good word is bread
for a thousand.

American confidence is down. Our collective faith in the system is in decline. Small ideas from the president tomorrow night will not go over well. I’m hoping he thinks big, no matter the political climate, because the opposition will be there no matter the scale of his plan. It could be, in fact, that only a huge and audacious plan has a chance of winning enough public support to pass through Congress.

“Tonight,” he might say, “We embark on a journey as significant and improbable as the journey to the moon proposed by President Kennedy nearly forty years ago. Tonight we begin a ten-year, $1 trillion race to finally achieve energy independence. These funds will be used to:

• hire millions of unemployed Americans to insulate the nation’s housing stock, whose heating and cooling costs use fossil fuels and create greenhouse gases unnecessarily;
• bring promising forms of renewable energy to maturity and scale, so their costs are no longer a barrier to their widespread adoption; and
• hire millions more Americans to rebuild and retrofit the nation’s schools and then challenge our young people to create the future of their dreams.

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