Our In-House SEO expert, Steve Haldi, explains how you can increase your search engine rankings and profile on your own, regardless of budget constraints!

WHY?
Long ago, when I was still a “junior” filmmaker, I acted as script supervisor on a Seattle Seahawks television ad series shoot.  The pay was decent, at about $50 per hour, but the cramp in my hand after an 8-hour shoot wasn’t worth it.  I decided I’d never do THAT again for less than $500 per hour.  We all know THAT’S not going to happen, though…

Twice, as an experienced filmmaker, I’ve been faced with a similar situation; once as the Foley/ADR/scoring guy for a film where the audio tracks didn’t get recorded by the synch guy, and once in one of those 48-hour film competitions, where we strayed so far from the existing script that we might as well have not had one.  Both times, I promised myself I’d never do it again. Well, years later, as an event videographer and documentary filmmaker, I find myself being required to do it all again.  But THIS time, with experience as an event videographer, I’ve discovered some great techniques to keep from going completely insane.

KEEPING FREE FROM INSANITY

1. If you can have a script supervisor on board during the shoots, DO IT! For those of you who don’t know the best way to do this, here’s what we do in our production house, for both tape-based and file-based shoots:
   1. GENERIC TECHNIQUES:
      1. USE A SLATE!  ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS use a slate if you can, even for event and documentary shoots.
         1. Your slate should be on camera for at least 5 seconds, and will aid immeasurably when scanning footage of any type later.
         2. Your slate should have shot number or scene, take number, and anything else that might be variable, like lens used, lighting, time of day, etc.
      2. Keep track SOMEWHERE of reel, tape, file number, etc., along with a description of what you’re shooting.  Even if you’re only keeping track of time code ranges with one-word descriptions, it’s better than nothing.
      3. Use a Script Log of your own design, or use the one I’ve attached to this article.  It will eliminate headaches before they start!
   2. FOR TAPE- or REEL-BASED shoots:
      1. Number all your reels BEFORE you start shooting.  When I’m doing shoots with mini-DV or film, I make this part of my pack-up checklist.
      2. Have the script supervisor, if available, note timecode and reel for EVERY push of the record button, along with a brief description of what’s being shot.  Don’t get too wordy here, or you’ll have a hand cramp that leaves you sayng, “never again for less than $500 per hour!”
      3. Develop a code for various types of shots.  For example, initials for characters that appear in each shot, a primitive sun or lightbulb for type of lighting, or a house icon or tree icon for location, perhaps. This will aid in quickly organizing shots later.
      4. If you have a script of ANY sort, make sure to note the shot and take for every segment.
   3. FOR FILE-BASED shoots:
      1. We do a number of shoots that are non-tape-based, recording directly to hard drive, where the footage will be either ingested later, or is “direct to edit.” If your DTE recorder has the ability to connect to a computer where you can have a script supervisor take notes directly attached to the footage as it’s being shot, DO IT! It took many edit sessions where I said, “Why didn’t I take advantage of this feature earlier?” before I started making it a habit!
      2. USE YOUR SCRIPT SUPERVISOR!  If you are acting as S.S., then take a break once in a while to note what you’ve shot.  Again, even if it’s just a file number range with a brief description, do it!

In the end, all of this may sound like common sense, but you’d be surprised just how many professionals fail to do it!  My suggestion is to make the preparation to track shoots part of your checklist, and make the tracking a habit that you never fail to follow.

Continuity_log.pdf

So… those that know me know that I’m a total gear-head.  I try to keep up with technology and gear by reading roughly 14 different industry trade rags - good thing I’m a speed-reader!

Sometimes, I get these great offers to try a piece of gear, or to upgrade something inexpensively, or a pre-market price I can’t refuse - That’s the case with this new direct-to-edit recorder from JVC, the MR-HD100, meant specifically for JVC’s GY- ProHD line  of cameras.

Now, I’ve owned another model HD direct-to-edit  recoder for about a year- the DR-HD100, and I’ve absolutely loved the convenience and time-saving aspects of it.  It’s been a true life-saver at times.

THE TYPICAL PROCESS
Typically, if I’m on a shoot where I’m covering4-8 hours of footage, I’ll use 4-9 tapes, (more for HD vs. SD), then I transfer the tape to computer in real-time, plus the time to change tapes, set up the transfer, etc.  “Digitizing” is really the wrong word for it, since the material is already digital, and I just transfer from the camera in real-time using a firewire cable.  Once the footage has been transferred, I spend anywhere from a day to a week taking notes on it, categorizing and organizing each clip so that editing goes faster.

THE TYPICAL DIRECT-TO-EDIT PROCESS
Enter the DTE recorder - My Firestore DR-HD100 has saved me countless hours of transferring, and where I’m using tape at the same time, it’s actually rescued me from tape drop-out issues. I have raved about this little device over the past year.  I shoot, thn back in the studio, I simply sort and edit.  Sometimes, I don’t even transfer from the drive to the computer; I’ll edit directly on the drive, THEN transfer. I’ve loved this unit, and it has loved me back, but a few weeks ago, I got this crazy offer I couldn’t refuse, giving me the opportunity to try the newest DTE recorder for the ProHD Camera, the MR-HD100.

THE NEW PROCESS.
If you look at the picture, you’ll see a USB dongle sticking up from the recorder.  You’ll also see an iPhone with a webpage prominently displaying “ProHD” at the top.  What’s this?!?

Well, I’ve been reading about this for a while, and I was so excited to get this, that I could barely contain myself.  The hours this would save me would be double those of the DR-HD100!

I shoot, and I edit.   What about the sorting and labeling? That’s where the dongle and the iPhone come in!  I can create a peer-to-peer network with the DTE recorder, and an assistant can take notes on each clip AS IT’S BEING SHOT!  If I’m on my own, I simply take notes after I hit record!  This is infitely cool!  The notes are attached directly to each clip as “metadata,” and can be read directly by Final Cut Pro, my non-linear editor of choice.  A little modification of the template allows me to make data for other editing software, as well.

How is it in practice?  Well, after a bit of fiddling around with Windowds networking on my IBM ThinkPad, I got it connected.  My Mac connected instantly, and I’m guessing an iPhone would do the same.  I decided to dedicate my ThinkPadto only 2 purposes, though: Takeing notes during shoots, and remote web access.

The process is wonderful!  Every time I hit “record” on the camera, a new page appears in my webrowser, generated by the DTE.  This page allows me to enter things like scene, title, take, etc - just about anything I want.  Another very cool aspect is that it records 720p at 24/30/60 fame rates directly to quicktime OR mt2 file.  VERY, VERY exciting!  Stay tuned for more reviews on this page!

How to Run a Guerrilla Marketing Program

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

This article gives you tips on setting up and executing a successful Guerrilla Marketing program. Whether it’s the utilization of street teams, spokesmodels, passing out samples or product demonstrations, street marketing reaches people where they work and play.

Steps

1. Be relevant. Your audience is fickle. Advertisements, billboards, radio, newspaper – they are bombarded all the time. Make your contact with them relevant to them, and you will win their heart. Flyer Distribution, Postering, Spokesmodels, Events, these are all great ways to communicate to your target audience, but you must be relevant. Promoting Coach Handbags at a Biker Convention is not relevant. Promoting Retirement Accounts to teenagers is not relevant. Think about your audience, get inside their heads. Think about what they like, and then you’ve got them.
2. Be where your audience is. An event may be high-traffic, but the traffic may be all wrong. Looks good on paper, but it doesn’t look so good when your street team arrives they realize it’s the wrong crowd. Your target audience has predictable behaviors, predictable patterns. If you understand your audience, understand their buying habits, understand where they like to be, and when you can have confidence that you guerrilla efforts will get in your audience’s hands.
3. Call to action. Whether Street Marketing or Guerrilla Marketing, it is difficult to measure CPM on a campaign that involves these elements. How do you know you are winning the good fight? Present your target audience with a hook, involve them in the game, and then you can track how they respond. If it is flyers, or posters, bar promotions, or sampling programs, even guerrilla wall projections, make your audience move, and you will be able to track the success or failure of the initiative. Websites, Scratch & Wins, Photo Ops that drive your target to a Branded Photo Page, Prize Giveaways, Call in & Win. All of these approaches make your audience move, and that movement can be measured.
4. Make your package creative. Packaging will have a lot to do with your success rate. Whether your teams are dressed in leotards instead of khaki, or you are giving them branded fruit instead of flyers, think about what will shake your target from the rigors of their daily pattern enough to see what you are showing them. Singing telegrams, or flyer distribution on roller-skates, Segway Marketing, or BASE Jumping from buildings – make a stir and the window of impression will open long enough for your point to hit home.
5. Leave it to the professionals. Don’t try to do it alone. We all see those commercials where there is a warning that says “These Are Trained Professionals. Do Not Attempt to Try This on your Own.” The same is true with street marketing, guerrilla marketing or non-traditional marketing. The professionals know what they are doing. Not all programs go 100% perfectly. In fact, most don’t. However, by using a professional street marketing agency, you can get all the resources you need, and if anything is not as you intended, they will fix it for you. A good promotional agency will have contingency plans to account for the ‘what ifs’ of a campaign, they will have back-ups, and a 24-hour support line. Plus, even though you may think you can do it alone, with the help of a source like craigslist, do you really want to add Hiring Personnel or Firing Personnel to your list tasks and responsibilities. Stick to what you do best, and let the professionals make your life easy, instead of letting a marketing and promotional campaign make your life hell.
6. Have a great team. The difference between an excellent promotional campaign and a rotten one can be determined by the street team you have on the ground. This is not an area where you want to skimp. You can have the very best materials, the very best call to action, and you could have anticipated your target demographic so well that you are at the perfect event, but without a A+ Team (of Managers, Staffers, Samplers, Spokesmodels, Emcees or Costumed Characters) to attack at will, you are at risk. Look for Enthusiasm, Professionalism, Ingenuity, Self-Starters, and Experience. Attractiveness is always a plus, and with some programs a major necessity, but that should not replace any of the above qualities and remember you will always get more and better results from someone who is truly excited that they were picked to be on the project rather than someone who felt it was your privilege to have them there.
7. Hit ‘em at all levels. The best defense is a good offense, and the best offense is one that attacks from all sides. Do not put all your street “marketing eggs” in one basket. Hit ‘em at all levels. What does this mean? It means diversify how and where your audience with be targeted and make sure you are there. Marketing 101 tells us that for your message to be truly effective, it takes 7-10 exposures of your product/name per consumer. A good street-level marketing campaign should include at least 5 of the following street components: hand-to-hand flyer distribution, strategic store drops, wild postings, permission-based postering, sidewalk stencils, product distribution & sampling, guerrilla projections, Segway marketing, roach baiting, branded pizza boxes/coffee sleeves and a good publicity stunt.
8. Have good timing. Understanding the question of WHEN is very important. If you are promoting a nightclub, flyer distribution during the day is not going to be as effective as hitting your target at night. If you are doing a coffee promotion, cruising the entertainment district in the evening may not be as effective as hitting commuters on their way to work in the morning.
9. Think about your product. Think about your target audience. Knowing their behavior will allow you to know the when that makes your campaign a wow.
10. Show your work! Everyone has a boss. Everyone wants to impress the boss! When it comes to non-traditional marketing campaigns, results can be tricky to measure, so get as much evidence of your work as possible. If you were buying advertising, you would show your boss the great ad that you purchase in LUCKY magazine. With non-traditional, or street, or guerrilla marketing, you can still show your boss how cool you are. Get photos! Get event reports! Hire a videographer or a professional photographer. Do what it takes to make sure that your initiatives are very well documented. If you take this step, you will be covered, even if the program goes south.
11. Communicate. Important note: When it comes to reporting, make sure that what you have in mind regarding reporting is well communicated to your team. A photo from a cellphone is technically an event photo, but it is not going to show well in a presentation to the board of directors. Be clear in what you are expecting and you have a much higher likelihood of not being disappointed by the results down the road).
12. Twist the norm. Be unexpected! Be shocking! Make the public look. If you have a great to-market approach, your audience will have no choice but to look, listen and absorb. Shake it up. If you are promoting a movie, pass out popcorn. If you are doing a trade-show for dental professionals, give the public floss. For every great promotion that hits the mark on timing, relevance, call to action, etc., taking a moment to anticipate what the public will expect and twisting it ever so slightly will catch their eye, make them remember it and compel them to share the experience with others. That is true viral marketing, true guerrilla marketing – major impact from minor cost due to creativity and solid execution.

Warnings

• Don’t wait until the last minute to plan or get assistance. You can run a cost efficient program using a Marketing agency, but waiting until 1 week before you need to get it done will cost you more money.
• Don’t forget that people, as a whole, have very short attention spans. Sure, a publicity stunt is great, but it’s important to flash that logo before the majority of your market turns their head to something more interesting. If your target market leaves before finding out who is behind the stunt, then the entire ordeal goes from surgically precise guerrilla marketing to you just being a person on top of a building in a chicken suit flapping his fake, yellow wings.

Related wikiHows

• How to Do Joint Venture Endorsement Marketing
• How to Create a Brand Positioning for a Small Business
• How to Market Your Alternative Health Business
• How to Increase Trade Show Traffic With Trade Show Giveaways

Sources and Citations

• Attack Marketing.NET

Article provided by wikiHow, a collaborative writing project to build the world’s largest, highest quality how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Run a Guerrilla Marketing Program. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

What?!?! Here’s how it works! If you pass a client to us by referral (you need to let us know, or the new client does), we’ll pay you 20% of the first job they book. In addition, for the first year after that, we’ll pay you 5% of everything they do, 4% for the 2nd year, 3% for the 3rd, 2% for the 4th, and 1% for the 5th year. Nice, huh? All designed to keep biz flowing nicely, and to thank our referring customers! Thanks!

Amazing New Gear

When CASE42 entered the Hi-Def video world a year ago, we didn’t expect that we’d be on par with the motion picture industry just a year later.

We recently acquired a JVC Pro GY-HD100 ProHD camera- “What does that mean,” you ask? This new camera is simply amazing. It is a cinematic high definition professional video camera, with tapeless, direct to edit recording, Anton Bauer Gold Mount battery packs, and a picture that looks more film-like than any camera in its class. For those who understand pro video lingo, this camera is a true progressive scan, 3 CCD, 24p to 60p, native widescreen, HDV camera with removable professional broadcast lenses. The image is astounding, and to catch a glimpse of what it looks like, check out Sony Pictures’ “Gabriel,” which was shot entirely on this camera, or “An Inconvenient Truth,” for which the HD100 was the primary camera. Industry professionals are rating this one of the best cinematic HD cameras available, and all agree that the colorimetry looks far less like high definition video than it does 35mm film.

We now have, in our arsenal of video production gear, the following:

…and lots, lots more! We edit on Apple’s Final Cut Studio, and do animation, special effects, and much more!

What does all this mean for you?

Well - it really means that when you’re ready to create that television commercial you always wanted, or need a marketing or instructional video, you get the top industry quality possible, and you’re not paying Hollywood rates! At CASE42, we OWN all of our equipment, and have no debt. That means you’re not paying for the interest on our non-existent loans.

2007 saw some great changes for CASE42!  During the summer, we decided to delve into the world of HD video, and purchased a Sony HD camcorder.  We love it!  It has some great capabilities, and shoots amazing images.  We also purchased a manual 14x lens for our trusty Canon XL standard dev camera.  Again, we love it!  The ability to simply open up the  iris manually and control zoom without a motor seems, somehow, more natural, and the images are fabulous!

In the world of software, we upgraded our photo manipulation software and our video editing suite, increasing capabilities and editing speed.  We also added some new 3D capabilities and particle generator special effects for video.  VERY cool!

We look forward to 2008 as another year of major upgrades, as we rebuild our 13 foot camera crane, tune up our dolly and track system, and finish up our steadycam upgrades.  In addition, we’re currently assembling an amazing 35mm adaptor system for our hi-def camera, and are designing a shoulder-mount stabilizer with matte box and rails.  This new rail system will allow us add infinitely more filters and a follow focus to an already great camera!

Special thanks to all our clients and associates for riding with us in 2007!

1.42 GHz Mini AV Workstation in a Briefcase MOD…

Recently, I had to travel to Hawaii for a video project, and I needed an Audio/Video editing workstation with me. I needed a computer with a lot of power & speed, video capture ability, audio and video in and out, editing with some reasonable speed, a lot of storage, and a big 17″ LCD.

I don’t own a laptop, but I had a 1.42GHz Mini laying around in a canvas bag, collecting dust. Lots of people have seen my mod and said that someone already invented the laptop, but this thing has infinitely more power and speed than any laptop I’ve ever used. And it’s a lot heavier, too! Power and weight… THAT’s what I wanted… right! I decided to get brave, and build my first MOD! This is how it went. It took more time than I imagined, but it was WELL worth it. I assume anyone attempting this already knows hot to take things apart, so I leave most of that out. All the pictures are clickable to see ‘em bigger.

Feel free to contact me if you have any Q’s!

1) Pull it apart

2) look around… see what we’re dealing with

3) Buy an adaptor and wait…

4) Mail from Australia!

5) break some wires in your IDE cable. Oops!

6) Reassemble the guts…

7) Get the briefcase ready

Mount the LCD onto some plexi for protection.

9) Recreate the laptop keyboard.

10) Get everything into the briefcase

You know, I’ve been in marketing and media production for 23 years, now, and I’ve seen a lot. I’ve seen brilliant ad guys lose their minds and close their companies when they lost a single, big customer. I’ve seen good “salesmen” bully their clients into staying with their ad firm by claiming that all media created by them during the contract belongs to the agency. And I’ve seen some real, honest marketing people do good work for their clients and create value for all concerned; but that’s the exception, and a rare one at that! (more…)

Our new Printshop, CASE42 Printing, has opened!  The pricelist is still in the works, but you can order from me right now!  GREAT prices, and a special for biz cards:  1000 full-color, heavy gloss  2-sided cards for $60!!!!

Click here: