Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

2011 was des­tined to be the year of mobile. Why? Because “this year” has been for the pre­dicted to be the year of mobile for the last 10 years.

With the explo­sive growth in tablets in the last year it’s safe to say it finally, truly was the year of mobile.

Tran­si­tion­ing to video busi­ness this year and cre­at­ing a start-up video busi­ness in Sep­tem­ber, I can also say that online video is truly on the minds of every­one in the mar­ket­ing, inter­ac­tive and adver­tis­ing busi­nesses. Cre­at­ing video con­tent for audi­ences now inter­act­ing more often on less work related devices that are more suited for video con­tent, I believe will fuel more growth in video next year.

Inter­net TV has received a fair amount of buzz this year. GoogleTV has popped up on lots of new devices and Net­flix has had some major suc­cess and fail­ures. I think IPTV is def­i­nitely the wave of the future as it is in phone tech­nol­ogy. We should see con­tin­ued growth here.

QR codes of course have also been all over the place this year. Here’s to hop­ing they get more thought­ful next year.

Loca­tion based apps have become ubiq­ui­tous — well, for any­one own­ing a smart phone. I have to say folks, I’m about sick of see­ing you check into work, lunch, and then work again.

Prob­a­bly the best part of the year has been that peo­ple are start­ing to under­stand social a lit­tle bet­ter. Fewer blank stares in meet­ings and also less reliance on the guru types. Social is also no longer the thing for the intern “cause they’re young and they under­stand that stuff.”

I haven’t seen any over­all sta­tis­tics for the year yet but just from what I’m hear­ing and see­ing is a lot of pain in the small to mid-sized ad agen­cies while the larger ones doing bet­ter this year. But not nearly as well as the larger inter­ac­tive shops. This is also a trend I think will con­tinue until tra­di­tional small ad agen­cies find a way to make them­selves rel­e­vant again or the econ­omy shifts dramatically.

2011 has truly been a mixed bag — lots of cool tech but stag­nate growth. Here’s to 2012 being a lit­tle more pos­i­tive on the growth side.

Ok, so I stole the “col­lab­o­ra­tion is the new com­pe­ti­tion” hook from Alex Bogusky, a true sage of our indus­try. You can read about his inter­pre­ta­tions of this phrase on his site, but let me take a moment to explain how it affects my busi­ness oper­a­tionally and one way I think it effects every­one involved in mar­ket­ing today.

I’ve writ­ten a lot here about the rapid change in tech­nol­ogy our indus­try is expe­ri­enc­ing right now. I’ve also writ­ten a lot about how smaller to mid­sized adver­tis­ing agen­cies are find­ing it hard to staff with enough tal­ented peo­ple. And how mar­ket­ing depart­ments strug­gle just to keep up with their work­load in their down­sized depart­ments. Every­one is stressed these days just to keep up with the work while busi­ness lead­ers are look­ing for strate­gies to stay prof­itable in the new economy.

For­tu­nately social tech­nol­ogy has enabled new ways of work­ing, con­nect­ing, and col­lab­o­rat­ing that, when lever­aged cor­rectly, can have real ben­e­fits to the cost and effec­tive­ness of pro­vid­ing ser­vices to clients. How so?

One exam­ple is Base­camp that enables project man­age­ment and col­lab­o­ra­tion with no regard for prox­im­ity or even brick and mor­tar. The cloud has freed us from the need for large and nar­rowly struc­tured orga­ni­za­tions to com­plete com­plex projects.

This means my busi­ness and even a group of free­lancers can func­tion within your project just as if we’re an inte­grated part or your orga­ni­za­tion. Sud­denly, col­lab­o­ra­tion isn’t pain in the butt for a project man­ager but a chance to bring in exper­tise and fresh think­ing from any­where on the globe.

It also allows busi­ness to add exper­tise and ser­vices with­out hav­ing to take on the sig­nif­i­cant costs of mov­ing to a big­ger space and hir­ing more peo­ple. Because col­lab­o­ra­tion is so much eas­ier these days, my busi­ness can inte­grate with your busi­ness in the cloud on a project by project basis. Imag­ine the flex­i­bil­ity and the cost advan­tages you sud­denly have.

Col­lab­o­ra­tion make you com­pet­i­tive. It can turn men into giants. And give small busi­nesses the reach of mega cor­po­ra­tions. Now each project you touch can be so much more effec­tive and drive more ROI. Truly, col­lab­o­ra­tion is the new com­pe­ti­tion. How will you use col­lab­o­ra­tion to become more effective?

Most single-media projects I’ve worked on in the last few years have included an after­thought. “Wouldn’t it be great to use this ______.” For­tu­nately I tend to over shoot things and have had the cre­ative abil­ity to find solu­tions for these after­thoughts. But the aver­age com­mer­cial pro­duc­tion these days usu­ally has lit­tle bud­get for get­ting extra­ne­ous footage beyond the 30 sec­ond cut.

What’s a mar­keter, an agency, or a con­tent pro­ducer do? Dis­cuss max­i­miz­ing the pro­duc­tion before the cam­eras roll or even the script is fin­ished. A small invest­ment in a longer shoot day or an extra shoot day can yield a cam­paign that works on four screens instead of one. On a tele­vi­sion, YouTube, iPad, mobile device. One that works on a home­page and not just as a 30 sec­ond spot.

Mak­ing great con­tent for an iPad isn’t just encod­ing an mp4 of your TV spot. Con­sid­er­a­tion should be given to the media in the cre­ative process.

Things to keep in mind:

Wide shots feel epic on a 50 inch plasma but just small on a mobile screen. Get lots of footage at var­i­ous focal lengths and con­sider using mul­ti­ple cam­eras to max­i­mize your pro­duc­tion time.

You often have longer to tell a story online, so make sure you get longer takes and give your actors time to breathe. It’s often more con­vinc­ing in the end too.

Your brand’s engage­ment most likely isn’t an inter­rup­tion if it’s on YouTube or your home page. Treat your audi­ence with respect and make sure the con­tent is actu­ally entertaining.

The online envi­ron­ment has so many dif­fer­ent plat­forms it can con­fuse even the old­est hats. Make sure you work with peo­ple who know a codec for a file container.

Recently Zacuto, a cin­ema gear com­pany fin­ished it’s Great Cam­era Shootout 2. They tested many of the most pop­u­lar cam­eras now used in com­mer­cial pro­duc­tion as well as 35 neg­a­tive film. The results were sur­pris­ing to some and proof for the initiated.

But what does it really mean to those in the cre­ative indus­try fac­ing more and more chal­leng­ing bud­gets, time­lines and clients? Does this mean every­thing can now be shot on a Canon Dig­i­tal Rebel in your brother-in-law’s base­ment? Not even close.

What it does mean is in the hands of a pro­fes­sional direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy, with solid crew and on the right project, amaz­ing results can be achieved from a cam­era sys­tem that costs less than your house. It also means that your work­flow can be quicker and more respon­sive. Sav­ing you time and adding cre­ative free­dom for your team.

10 years ago it was pop­u­lar to shoot rever­sal film and process it for neg­a­tive. Five years ago it was pop­u­lar to shoot tung­sten film out­side and then desat­u­rate it in trans­fer. Film stocks gave us an extra tool to express our cre­ativ­ity. Now this new wave of dig­i­tal cam­eras is giv­ing us a sim­i­lar tool­box but this time with cam­eras that have dif­fer­ent strengths and weaknesses.

Here’s my over­sim­pli­fied cheat sheet:

DSLRs are like 16mm was, nim­ble less expen­sive to pro­duce with. But they are not the pin­na­cle of image qual­ity. Right now, com­pres­sion is still an issue for some applications.

Pana­sonic AF100 is like shoot­ing super 16, many peo­ple won’t be able to tell the dif­fer­ence between it’s image and 35 mm film but it’s smaller sen­sor size means less options for lenses, greater depth of field, and its com­pres­sion, thus image qual­ity, isn’t as good as the big guns.

Arri Alexa is like shoot­ing a 35mm neg­a­tive, it pre­serves the most high­lights, giv­ing you amaz­ing image qual­ity on par with 35 mm film.

Red Epic 5k is like shoot­ing super 35. This cam­era pro­vides a larger image that give even greater room for crop­ping, plus Red Raw pre­serves more color infor­ma­tion and lat­i­tude for manip­u­la­tion in post.

These are just a few of the more pop­u­lar cam­eras often dis­cussed with com­mer­cial shoot­ers. When your bid­ding your next job, ask the direc­tor why they want to use a par­tic­u­lar cam­era over another. It’s not just a bud­get­ing choice, it’s a cre­ative one too.

Like when Gale Tat­ter­sall chose to shoot House with Canon DSLRs because it was the best way to shoot in con­fined spaces. He then worked within the sys­tems lim­i­ta­tions to achieve great television.

Or maybe if you’re shoot­ing on a set, you don’t need the same depth of field so the work­flow of the AF100 could save you money to use in post or the art department.

For the last 50 years, adver­tis­ing broad­cast and video pro­duc­tion has been an out­sourced process that uti­lizes a vast amount of agency bill­able hours, ven­dors and free­lancers while pro­vid­ing lit­tle direct con­trol over the process for the client. It’s not uncom­mon for a com­mer­cial shoot to rival a movie pro­duc­tion with the num­ber of crew and semis.

Unfor­tu­nately this is often the world where the best tal­ent oper­ates. One where the client is stuck in video vil­lage, iso­lated from the process by a 200-foot video cable, mul­ti­ple lay­ers of pro­duc­ers and an elit­ist attitude.

For those that have been try­ing to ignore the stock mar­ket, whose pagers keep buzzing with calls to work as 4^th assis­tant to the assis­tant on a beer com­mer­cial, it’s time to wake up. Clients don’t need to put up with the old model any­more. I sug­gest you stop mak­ing fun of the kid with the 7D and con­sider buy­ing one yourself.

Thirty years ago we were here in print tech­nol­ogy. Every major city had spe­cial­ized type houses, photo labs, and pre-press shops. There were teams of peo­ple who per­fected the build­ing and deliv­ery of print ads to news­pa­pers and mag­a­zine ads. They were staffed by tal­ented pro­fes­sion­als with a high degree of skill. Most of these places don’t exist anymore.

Today we have dig­i­tal presses and soft­ware that enables one per­son to do it all on the same desk­top. But we also have dig­i­tal cam­eras that shoot cin­e­matic images at native 800 ISO and prod­ucts like Adobe CS Pro­duc­tion, Apple FCP Suite, and Autodesk Smoke that can poten­tially com­plete post pro­duc­tion from a sin­gle desktop.

This means leaner and meaner crews, no film devel­op­ing and trans­fers, and a more inte­grated pro­duc­tion process. It also means that it’s fea­si­ble for a sin­gle orga­ni­za­tion to pos­sess the abil­ity to script, pro­duce, direct and com­plete post pro­duc­tion with­out being a mas­sively expen­sive com­pany to oper­ate and hire. This is where Fluid Films comes in. Wel­come to the future.

A study by Cisco VNI states that by 2014 90% of web traf­fic will be video. You might want to read that again. And no, it’s not a typo.

This is prob­a­bly one of the more shock­ing num­bers on the rise of video on the Web but maybe not the only one that will amaze you:

Did you know that Net­flix accounts for 30% of inter­net traf­fic.

Or that iPad users watch three times more video?

Or that video traf­fic will exceed 50% of mobile traf­fic this year?

I don’t need to flog the news­pa­pers. We know that printed word has lost its dom­i­nance. Video con­tent has estab­lished itself as the pri­mary form of mass com­mu­ni­ca­tion. And web dis­tri­b­u­tion is quickly becom­ing the best way to reach diverse audi­ences on their own terms. And as con­nected devices includ­ing tablets, smart­phones and set top boxes become more impor­tant that com­puter desk­tops, Web video will not only be impor­tant but essen­tial to a brand’s success.

Your audi­ence no longer just has a lean in, “inter­ac­tive”, work rela­tion­ship with the web. Today it’s also social, relaxed, play­ful and fluid. It goes where she goes. And you have to too. That’s where Fluid Films comes in.

A year ago I began a jour­ney that started at my for­mer employer. My job tran­si­tioned from being sim­ply a writer to a video con­tent cre­ator. Not only did I love this new role, I dis­cov­ered I had a real pas­sion for it.

I also believed in what I was doing. It was the right thing for the clients.

This pas­sion birthed a busi­ness plan. One that I feel very strongly about and that I had hoped to exe­cute with my for­mer employer. But that didn’t happen.

When oth­ers don’t act you can sit around and com­plain or you can har­ness your pas­sion, work with oth­ers that feel the same way, and do some­thing cre­ative. The world today is a tough place but it’s up to cre­ative peo­ple to make the most of it and cre­ate oppor­tu­nity for us and others.

So today, my busi­ness part­ner, Jason Gor­bett and I are offi­cially announc­ing the found­ing of Fluid Films. Over the next sev­eral days, I’ll be shar­ing our vision for a trans­me­dia com­pany and how what we’re doing is the right thing for com­pa­nies and insti­tu­tions. Please stay tuned.

I don’t usu­ally blog about per­sonal things. I usu­ally post about per­sonal stuff on Face­book. But this is one of those few times that the per­sonal and pro­fes­sional are one.

Over the last cou­ple years my pro­fes­sional direc­tion has changed slightly. No longer just writ­ing copy for ads and social media, I began edit­ing and then shoot­ing video. Which isn’t all that crazy since dur­ing the time I was work­ing in Los Ange­les I was direct­ing com­mer­cials as well as free­lance copywriting.

It was inevitable that this tran­si­tion was com­ing from copy­writer to writer/director. And with the rapid rise of web con­tent and shrink­ing adver­tis­ing bud­gets there’s no bet­ter time to embrace the change with my full atten­tion, pas­sion, and on my own terms.

I’ll be blog­ging about what exactly this means over the next week.

This arti­cle is reposted from Kil­gan­non­Says, my for­mer employ­ers blog.

Last week the Twit­ter­sphere was all abuzz about Google+. A sim­ple search shows the net­work already has 9 mil­lion users. Prob­a­bly even more by the time you read this.  My first impres­sion is that it is no Google Wave, Apple Ping, or even Google Buzz. In fact, I’m pre­dict­ing a hit – prob­a­bly not on the scale of Face­book, but a hit nonetheless.

While 9 mil­lion is still a pal­try sum com­pared to Twitter’s 200 mil­lion or Facebook’s 750 mil­lion users, Google+ is des­tined to be a place where mar­keters can learn about their cus­tomers and effec­tively tar­get them. Not to men­tion, a good show­ing on the social net­work should have a pos­i­tive effect on your brand’s search engine recognition.

So what’s a brand to do? Wait, mostly. Google+ is by invite only for the time being. Your busi­ness can apply to be one of a lim­ited num­ber of busi­nesses on Google+ in the future. Of course, as an indi­vid­ual, once you’re on the net­work, you can hock your wares to any­one will­ing to listen.

Soon, you’ll be able to mon­i­tor your brand’s activ­ity on Google+, at least in pub­lic posts. This should pro­vide a valu­able new way to gather infor­ma­tion and respond to cus­tomers and poten­tial prospects.

Remark­ably, Google+ is cur­rently ad free. But just like YouTube, search, and most of Google’s other prod­ucts, con­tex­tual and ban­ner ads are cer­tain to arrive.

As new func­tion­al­ity is revealed, oppor­tu­ni­ties will arise. Mar­keters should pay atten­tion to changes here and, for that mat­ter, at all the social networks.

Whether or not your busi­ness takes an active role on Google+ depends on if it makes good busi­ness sense. Ask your­self: Are your busi­ness cus­tomers there? Can your busi­ness com­mu­ni­cate valu­able infor­ma­tion to them on the site?

Has Google+ fac­tored into your mar­ket­ing plans yet? If so, how do you plan on using it?

It seems when Google or Apple unveils some prod­uct the Twit­ter­sphere goes nuts for a few days or maybe a week. Peo­ple have being flam­ing the com­ment streams and mes­sage boards over FCP X for the last week, Google Buzz was a huge topic of con­ver­sa­tion for about three days. Wave, a lit­tle longer but even then, it turned out to be a giant flop. Oh, and do you remem­ber when Google Voice was the invite to get?

How­ever, Google con­stantly has a lot of new stuff and beta stuff hap­pen­ing. Maybe you didn’t know it but there’s also Music Beta hap­pen­ing (check it out).  And over at Google Labs you can tweak your search or check out new prod­ucts that aren’t +. Also did you know about Google.org? Here you’ll find out how Google is try­ing to save the world.

This isn’t a puff piece about Google, I have good and bad feel­ings about how they’ve affected the adver­tis­ing indus­try. What I am say­ing is that social media causes us to act very mob like. We get so focused on the present shiny object as a group that we fail to talk about all the other stuff that’s hap­pen­ing and, even more excit­ing, the larger trends that truly affect­ing our careers and lives. Like say, mob behavior.