Production Values
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking for the past few days about production values on the web. The advent of social networks, video sites, podcasts and blogs has made them really take a nose dive. We’re back in the age of high-school video production classes, horrid writing and reverb saturated audio. This effect has made it acceptable, if not desirable, for the so-called professional media to embrace as their main aesthetic quality. It’s as if for you to be “cool” you have to make junk productions.
The fact is that in this day and age there is absolutely no excuse to make a poor quality product. The equipment I can buy in my local Best Buy is leaps-and-bounds better than the stuff I could buy 5 years ago. Even a cheap microphone has great quality. A couple of hardware store clip-on lights can properly illuminate a “set”. This stuff is simply not difficult. The only thing it takes to make a video production of very acceptable quality is a decent microphone, camera and some lights.
Take a look at the work of Ze Frank’s “The Show” to see what I’m talking about. He used a decent mic, camera and the lighting available to him in a smart way. It took him all of 10 minutes to set up the day’s shot. Sure, he actually took some time to write what he was going to talk about and memorize it. Sure, he took some time to edit things well. Sure, he’s a very talented and funny guy by nature. But none of these things is difficult to achieve if you’re a reasonably creative person.
On the higher-end are the excellent TED Talks. This is a conference where people pay good money to see really smart people talk about the stuff they do. After the conference they publish a DVD for the members of the TED community and post some number of the talks online for the public. These multi-camera shoots made by professionals, but their techniques are far from difficult for people to achieve with even modest means.
Another good example of decent production values (albeit with poor quality audio) are the productions of Revision3. They are a startup in San Francisco formed by refugees of the now defunct TechTV. They have built a small studio space where they produce simple episodic shows about technology trends. They spend some amount of money on graphics packages, talent and equipment, but I get the impression that they are run on a fairly small budget.
These 3 examples of decent production values are fairly difficult to spot on today’s computer screens. There seems to be a dearth of high-quality productions out there. I wish companies would spend a little time to educate their staffs on how to make good productions. They should start by teaching 3-point lighting, good microphone technique, and editing. These are the bare minimum to get someone started on the path to high quality productions and they take only a day to teach. The harder parts, like writing, take a bit more time, but all of it has significant payoff in the end. If you teach your people how to use the tools you’ve given them you will be rewarded with happy viewers.
