It used to be, says Julian Mather. Now it’s easy to make videos that delight your team, reassure clients and take you less time than writing an email.
The expectation is upon us that we use video within our businesses. It’s the video age after all. Stop. Don’t run for digital cover. As an EA you have a distinct advantage. You have interesting things to video: conferences, retreats, Christmas parties (to name a few). Let me show you a way you can leverage your variety of organisational roles to create videos that build better business relationships.
An “aha moment”
No need to run to the camera store. Everything you need is at your fingertips, literally. You have a pocket sized TV station in your hand—called a smartphone—ready and waiting. Yes, really. I’m a world-class videographer and the only camera I own is a smartphone.
The reassurance video
Beyond the nods and smiles and the genuine expressions of trust in our ability, people still need reassurance that it’s all under control. Those who bankroll an event really want to know that the money is being well spent. The rest of the team want to know their collective efforts aren’t wasted. Humans love reassurance. Video can help you give this reassurance.
What you’ll need
- your smartphone
- a $5 selfie stick
Set up
Put your smartphone onto the compressed selfie stick with the camera lens pointing at you. So, this is the opposite of what you would think. You would think you would have the phone in selfie-mode so you were looking at yourself on the screen, but no.
The secret move
Simply hold the selfie stick (don’t extend out, just as short as possible) and roll the handle with your fingers with a little help from your wrist and spin the phone 180 degrees. That’s it. It rolls around so fast that in the video it just looks like a fancy video effect between shots. I call it the wrist twist.
Let’s make a reassurance video
Open up your camera app, select video and press the red record button. Now using a wrist twist with your hand holding the selfie-stick, spin the phone so the camera lens is pointing at you (with the screen facing away) and start talking.
Don’t worry, you will be in shot even though you are not looking at yourself on the screen. The lens has a wide enough angle. Try it out, you’ll see. Now take your client on a guided tour of the event, talking them through everything that’s going well and pointing out the problems that have been sorted. Nothing like seeing with their own eyes to reassure them all is under control.
When you get to something that you want them to see, simply spin the phone 180 degrees via the wrist twist. This is why we started with the camera back to front.
Plan where you are going to walk and you can easily make a short two or three minute video in one take, just spinning back and forth as required. Even though the camera is facing away, the microphone will clearly pick up your voice.
Take a PostIt note with your talking points and stick it to the back of the phone so you can jog your memory while walking and talking.
A quick tidy up
You can easily remove the beginning and end parts where you are turning the camera on and off, by using the edit function in your phone’s photo viewer. It certainly isn’t necessary, people are accepting of video being a little rough around the edges.
A nice send off
Now all that remains is to send the video to your client. That’s easy too. Use wetransfer.com, it’s free, intuitive and you can email up to 2GB of any sort of file including video directly from your phone. You’re happy because making a complete video took you about 10 minutes and your client or team is happy because they are in the loop. Welcome to the video age.
 THE EXPERTJulian Mather is a world-class videographer with clients like ABC TV, BBC and National Geographic. The only camera he now owns is a smartphone. He introduces businesses struggling to use video to simple 21st Century video business building strategies.www.julianmather.com |
