Smile! You’re On Camera
This month at Ashton, we broke into a new medium. Video! We’re looking to give people an opportunity to get to know the Ashton team, while at the same time providing worthwhile information to our viewers. Check out our first go of it below, on the topic of working from home.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15KAtlP7ja0&t=47s
Not a bad start, eh? I’m the one on the left, and I’m going to tell you a bit about my experience with this video, as well as my expectations of future Ashton video content.
I don’t remember if it was my idea or Jim Abbott’s (our sales and marketing guy), but after what seems like a single casual conversation, I found myself in a meeting about seriously exploring the idea of producing video content for our company. We kept the meeting small in an effort to avoid too many cooks in the kitchen. Within a couple of minutes, it was obvious that there was a bit of an addictive part to this type of production: Conceptualizing. Bouncing ideas off of each other was a blast, imagining what we could make and how much fun we could have making it. More importantly, how entertaining (and beneficial) it could be to the viewer. This part is critical and is how we plan to set ourselves apart from the crowd.
We Need to Stand Out
I have to be honest with you, the reader… much of the tech related content out there is visual chloroform. I had an initial vision of what our first video would be, and what boxes we needed to have checked when it was complete. Entertaining to watch was first and foremost in my mind, and I was determined to achieve that in one way or another. Otherwise, I knew our content would be entirely too similar to 99% of what’s out there already. Fortunately, the entire team was in agreement, which created a great feeling of creative freedom. The informational aspect of the video is of course important, but video feels like a strange medium to package purely informational material into. It feels like a wasted opportunity if you don’t take advantage of the other opportunities it presents. With this first video and future videos, we are going to be able to showcase our team and really show viewers who they get to work with when they enter a business partnership with Ashton Technology Solutions.
How Matters! And Who Does Too
Our research has shown us that people care less about the ‘what’, and more about the ‘who’ and the ‘how’. Confused? We play in a very crowded market place, one with very specific table stakes; a security solution, backup solution, 24/7 monitoring, yada yada yada. What makes Ashton different is the team that’s offering the solutions and how we actually provide those solutions! With that in mind, we are eager to put our personable team in the limelight and encourage them to be themselves. I’m confident that this will result in enjoyable content for all. The goal is being memorable, the format is casual, and we won’t shy away from straight up parody videos… We like what we do and we are going to show that in every way that we can.
Whether we achieved these points with our first ever video remains to be seen. You tell me what you think, as I’m a bit biased obviously. I think it is a decent entry that provided an excellent foundation for future content. I’ll point out a few areas where I think we fell short, as well as the gear we used and specific things I learned.
The Technology We Used
For the video in this production, we used two iPhones on tripods. These devices performed just fine and we plan to use them again for future recordings. For audio, we attempted to use lapel microphones to record, with the idea that we would then edit in the audio using an open source program called Audacity. After exporting the audio, we learned that all of what we recorded was basically unusable and indecipherable. Therefore, we were forced to use the audio captured with the iPhones in the final version. We determined what the issue was (audio was exported incorrectly, and then deleted, meaning that we couldn’t go back and export properly) and will achieve high quality audio for future content. Unfortunately, the low quality audio was our biggest shortcoming in this first entry, followed by a few rough transitions between bits. Additionally, we also lacked consistency in the frame positioning, and will also need to pay attention to the noise level of the air conditioning in our conference room, where we filmed. It can clearly be heard toward the beginning, and could not be completely cleaned up during the editing process. And speaking of editing, I learned that I’m completely in love with video editing. Taking a mashup of potentially usable material and creating something cohesive with it is very satisfying. The program we use to edit the video is Adobe Premier Pro. Amazing things can be done in this program and as I learn more about it I hope that it shows in content to come.
More Coming Soon
As we streamline the production process, we will be able to put out more and more content with less time in between. We are filming our second and potentially our third videos tomorrow, July 10th. These will be quick ones on the topic of Microsoft Teams and some things we’re pretty sure you didn’t know. Having our first video in the bag absolutely instills a sense of confidence, and I’m excited to get more of our team in front of the camera.
