 OK, go and we can let everybody else trickle in. We do have a limited time again on the room today. So I'd like to introduce Ian Harris, who you've probably seen already this week. Ian is an architect turned filmmaker and he co-founded Arbuckle Industries, which is based in New York City. And it focuses on architectural cinematography. Some of their notable subjects include Bill Clinton and David Byrne and have also worked with Pritzker winners Tom Main, Zaha Hadid, Richard Meyers, Shigaroban, and many others. Their clients include notable brands, such as Architect Magazine, Friends of the Highline, the AIA New York chapter at C, and so on. At Arbuckle, Ian directs the business side of the company and also produces and manages the projects that they create. His love for stories behind the built environment led him to leave the practice of architecture and decide to pick up the camera and bring these stories to light. Since founding Arbuckle in 2007, he's helped the company produce dozens of films and has conducted over 100 interviews with leading artists, architects, designers, industry leaders, and politicians. He's spoken at dozen events ranging from national conferences, PR, marketing groups, film festivals, and design schools all over the country. When he's not in Arbuckle or on a shoot, you can find him Daylighting as a design education teacher at local art organizations or schools or camping in the nearby mountains, which I wonder where the mountains are in New York. Those castills. Those low old mountains. So help me welcome Ian. All right, so play, right? Press play. So I have a couple of questions. This is a presentation that I've adapted. I give this a lot to marketing crowds and professional architects to sort of preach the big fight. Actually, I need to turn on my mic. Can you guys hear me all right back there? More? Better? How about now? All right, I should be used to this stuff, right? So this presentation is coming from a perspective of why would you use video as an architect, right? You guys are not right now licensed architects, but you might one day be, hopefully. So, or you could become a filmmaker like me. So who wants to own their own firm at some point down the road? See the hands, all right? So there's a good number of you, right? All right, so a lot of architects do the majority of licensed architects are small practice. Small practice is a couple of people, individuals. But the big question is, how do you get work, right? This is something that they don't really touch on in architecture schools usually. And you sort of learn it by the fire when you get out into practice, especially also just even thinking of the business side. So entrepreneurship, marketing, all these things that you're not really exposed to too much in the study of architecture, but I want to sort of open your eyes up to this medium as we discuss. So this is what I should turn off that little loud thing, right? Here's my mouse. So lights, camera, action, right? So these are some of the topics I'm going to run through. And I'm going to speak through some of them quicker and slow down on some of them. But basically, why would you want to use video in an architecture firm? Why would you want to use it to promote your project, promote your work, talk about your work, explain your work, and then beyond sort of after the fact, after the building is done, but how can you use it to potentially win competitions, get work, right? It's all sort of a closed loop so they affect each other. What kind of video should I make? I'm going to show you some of the very, very direct, straightforward, formulaic videos that we offer and that we produce a lot of. I'm not going to get too much into some of the more innovative creative formats because this guy's the limit there. And honestly, this is a giant battle that I'm fighting to preach the gospel of video and it's just the very beginning of this. So what I'd like to do is show you some of the more straightforward formulaic stories that you could use surrounding your projects. The next, which I won't go too much into, but we try to preach to a lot of our clients that they should be doing some of the video in-house. Same thing with architects and their work taking photo documentation. Basically as the more the youth come into the profession, the more the youth understands video and the medium video and photography. So the more that you guys are interjected into this profession, slowly, slowly it's adapting to new mediums, which video is one of them. Have any of you been asked to go out and photograph projects in an internship? Some of you have done that, right? They're probably like, oh, we'll send a low billable person out there to the field to go take some photographs. They're young, they probably get photo photography a little bit better. So documenting your work is very critical. The presentation last night, the photographs that you guys have were gorgeous, right? And I was telling my class how that could be, that is directly used how to promote your work and get clientele and get press. How to start or make a creative brief. So if you're looking at beginning to do a video, what are some of the key questions that I would ask as a video production company when we start the conversation with clients? So these are sort of the starter questions and topics to think about before you begin the production process. Next, just a quick outline of what the video production process is and what takes place in each stage. And then last, it's a little bit about distribution and outreach and the use of video, which is extremely powerful. So that's what we're gonna talk about. And my presentation's gonna crash. I'm gonna freak it out. So who am I? Andrew just sort of talked about a little bit, I started architecture. A guy who studied landscape architecture my first job at a school sat next to me and we were sitting there working one day and sort of going out and having happy hour drinks after work started talking about, oh, the good old days of studio and the people that were in the studio and we both love documentary and we were sort of startled to find that no one had done a doc about architecture school. So it was sort of a little idea that sort of floated around and after a few years of us working various firms and bouncing around, we cobbled together enough funding. And this is in 2007 that we went and sort of left our professional jobs, moved to New York, shot the Separat Institute, documented the students. They graduated in May of 2008. There was already a recession in the architectural industry so our donations were drying up and then the economy tanked, right? So it just imploded. So we didn't go back to the profession, we took part-time jobs and we started to build a company around this niche market that we realized that no one had touched. And so we've been doing that since 2007. So it's been a long, long progression and you sort of got the list of array of work that we've done. This is a short little piece, just to give you guys a sense of some of our work. It's sort of what you consider a real. So it's a quick artistic compilation of some of our shots and I'll let you just watch. All right, so that's, you know, in film production industry, this is a real, right? So it's just a quick compilation with a stock track of showing you some of the range of our shots. And like Andrea said, we've done a lot of work with architects, that's our niche. So I think at this point where we've crossed the 200 mark of the amount of architects we've put on camera, we do stuff with other industries. We do a lot of sort of like startup and tech stuff in New York, but to get outside of this world of architecture. But it is our niche. We've put a ton of people on camera. A lot of the well-known egos out there we've dealt with. And, you know, so we're really versed in this specific space of architectural cinematography and storytelling. But enough sort of about the background stuff. Let's jump into some of the meat. So why would you want to do video, all right? A lot of this is gonna be very sort of marketing heavy, right? So like, how are you communicating your design, right? And why would you wanna do that? So what are the purposes and how can video be used? So some of the first ones is obviously, you know, the money comes from business development or marketing. Where's the budget coming from? And so we want to get some new clients, right? That's like, you need work, right? Got work, how do you get work? Video is an extremely powerful medium, right? It's a soft sell so it can live on your website 24-7. It's online, it's shareable. They can be looking at it while lying in bed because someone's like, oh, check out this architect. Here's a little video, send your link to it, right? Instead of clicking through a whole bunch of images, right? You control the story in the video. Now it's not guaranteed they're gonna stay there the whole time, right? But as in your photographs, you don't know how they're going to interact with your photographs. You don't know the moment-to-moment experience that they're having with your photos, right? So a video, you press play, they're watching that video. So it's a very, very precious, specific experience. And you have so much more control over this compared to sort of standard text or photography. You know, so it can showcase and communicate your work. Architects love to talk about process, what is their process, how unique potentially is their process. Culture is another one, right? You might wanna sell sort of the sort of vibrant culture that is in your office, your own design process and how that culture affects the designs that you come up with. And you know, everyone enjoys video. I mean, old to young, right? It's not just a young person's format, not a medium. Everyone enjoys it, they get it, they're used to it. And it's just only increasing more and more. So client acquisition. The next big one, if you were owning your own company or if you were further on down the line and had enough stake in a certain firm, you might want, you know, talent is the end all be all. If you don't have smart people working for you and first of all people working for you, then your firm is sort of a one-trick pony. And if you don't get enough of that work, you dry up and you close. So it's the same, it's both acquiring new talent and at the same time creating something that will retain the current talent that you have. So there's a lot of video work that we do for like, we've done a bunch of stuff for like Gensler and no one's ever seen that besides if you work at Gensler. They just posted, it's been, you know, tens of thousands of dollars on videos that only are for use internally. That is completely about perpetuating and collecting the culture of Gensler. Gensler has an issue because, you know, how many offices they have, dozens and dozens and dozens. So keeping some sort of consistency across the entire network is very difficult at that scale. So both attracting and retaining, same as I said before, it's 24 seven, it's out there always. It's a great way for an applicant to find out about your firm without having to sort of know someone directly in your office or finding them through LinkedIn or whatever, right? So it's a great, amazing, powerful way to showcase and communicate your work, your process or your culture. So talent. The other aspect of video, which, you know, is something that we're still trying to push and make more prevalent in the work that we do with the architectural community is to make the videos more personable, visceral and memorable. But I mean by that is developing the narrative so that your audience member is doing a little bit more than just watching and learning about a project or learning about your firm, but maybe having some sort of engagement with this piece beyond that. So did they laugh? Is there anything comedic in this? Probably not too many videos you wanna do as an office or an architect to make people crack up. But I mean there are examples of sort of comedic plays on architectural processes that can engage an audience in a very different medium than just doing the straightforward, purely artistic piece, right, there's a time and place for both. But video allows you to have a much deeper engagement with your viewer, the ability to communicate tone and narrative through music, through this shot selection is extremely visceral and is much more memorable and stays with your audience, with your viewer much longer. So engagement is key, shareable. So videos are ubiquitous, right, they're everywhere. The AEC, which is the architecture engineering construction industry is light years behind everything else, right, more like 10 years later, we catch up to everything, we're super delayed, print publications are way ahead of us and their dinosaurs. So this industry is very slow to adapt this medium and that there's a whole other slew of reasons of obviously why that's the way it is because architects don't really make that much money and our budgets are squeezed. So there's other ways to talk about financing a project which I'll get into a little bit later. But because video is so ubiquitous online and these are sort of statistics that are sort of like no-brainers but it's always good to just sort of realize like how effective and powerful videos as far as its shareability and getting a message out there. So 19% of what's being shown, social media is video which isn't super high but it's a pretty nice chunk. 70% of business to business marketers already use video. So everyone that's out there trying to get work from each other, right, which is what architects do, you're getting work from another business. 70% of people are already using it. Videos are three times more likely to get inbound links than text so that means an inbound link is clicking on something and coming back to your website which is what you want to generate because that's where all of the rest of your visuals are, your texts that describe you. So if someone watches a video and it's embedded on someone's random website, check out this firm, it's really cool, whatever. They're three times more likely to come back to your website after watching that video than if they just read some text about it. And obviously that sort of mobile explosion, audience is three times more likely to view a video as opposed to desktop viewers. So as we get more and more mobile, more and more people have been using video on mobile devices. So this is where the current's going. This is not new news, usually just bring this up to sort of alert the crowd again that this is what's occurring. I'm gonna get into sort of a little bit of a case at the end of here when I talk about distribution but the analytics and metrics in the back end of video is just insanely powerful information. You can know where people are watching it, where they're coming from. It's somewhat similar to what you can do with your website analytics but it gives you such amazing power to find out where people are watching your content and what's great about video which separates it from text and photos is that you post the video in one location and you can potentially post it in multiple spots if you're intelligent about it. But all of that data is collected into a single place. This is some thumbnails I've shown from YouTube. So no matter who takes your video and posts it somewhere else and displays it on their blog or is watching it on their mobile phone on Facebook, all of that information is being tied back to a single location for your metrics. So where are people watching my video? This is a way to find out where new clients could be online, physically and potentially digitally. So it's extremely powerful to just dig back and find out where these people are watching this content. And yeah, it's live, trackable. Super detailed, I'll get into that a little bit later. And then, search engine optimization. So I was in my class yesterday and I was like, SEO. And I was like, you guys, and I got some looks and I'm like, wait, so you guys, is anybody an SEO? And they didn't know what SEO meant. So search engine optimization, which is basically how effective your content is, is going up the search rates, right? So as an architect, you're probably not gonna get a job from somebody searching healthcare designer, Minneapolis, some neighborhood. That's probably not how you're gonna get someone from a healthcare institution finding your firm name. But it is a way potentially if you're doing residential architect for someone that's looking for a residential architect in a certain area, or if your information or content is tagged correctly, your videos and your photographs are rising up to search engine optimization so that content is being viewed at the top when someone searches that. Everything is Google, right? And Google is basically keywords. Those keywords that your potential clients, potential new hires are typing in is what you need all of your content to have plastered everywhere. You need to tag it, needs to be in the text, needs to be embedded in the photographs, it needs to be in the video, right? And those keywords are the core statements that you're using to differentiate yourself amongst your competition. So SEO and video basically, these stats explain video just explodes your likelihood to raise up the rankings. So that's sort of some of the quick reasons why you might want to look at video if you were practicing architecture or had an office. But so these are four quick little snippets and I probably won't even play them completely because I don't want to spend too much time. But these are the four styles of video that we sort of say this is the baby steps beginner sort of ideas that we present when we talk to a firm when they've not touched video before. So one is a company-wide profile. So tell me the story of the firm. We do this a lot for firms that have been around for 20 years, 10 years, 50 years, right? We've been around for a long time. What also happens is firms will after a period of time, maybe the people who started the firm are retiring and there's a new group of people that are taking over. So it's a way to illustrate the transition that could be happening. That happens quite frequently, right? Tell us the culture, tell us the sort of range of work that you do. This is a lot of sort of like talking heads, right? Interviewees in there sort of explaining. The next would be the portfolio segment showcase. So here's my really amazing residential work. I'm just gonna show you one single column of my work, one of, you know, one segment of our portfolio. Here's an array of my beautiful residential work, right? You can do the same thing for, you know, name it in the building type. So that's another product. Third is the most probably traditional is the sort of legacy project. I've got one project that we know is amazing. We love it. It's gonna be phenomenal. Let's start documenting it. Let's make this into a short film. You could have people talking in it or it could be just simple, no narration. You could just have beautiful cinematography and maybe text popping in. So there's a lot of different ways to do that. And then the last is a series which is a way to sort of think about breaking apart a collection of similar storylines, right? So similar structures of content. So maybe, and, you know, you can mix these up. So the portfolio segment could then be broken up and then some of the projects that you showed in the portfolio segment could then have their own individual project that fits into a series. So, you know, this is, you know, all connects together. So I'm gonna jump into these. I'm curious, working with CLR design, the most important aspect of our relationship with CLR is the ability to come to the table and allow for an aggressive design process to take place. And it's because CLR is extremely talented at conceiving of and executing zoo exhibit. CLR design has been a zoo and animal exhibit design since the middle 80s. We're very strong believers that we've got a legacy to carry on. So it's important for us to continue the same solid thinking that helped establish a firm. You know, we started with just a handful of folks back then and now we're over 25 professionals just focused on zoo design. We think, you know, like exhibit designers, we just don't think like architects or landscape architects. We've kind of created our own niche as exhibit designers. That's what's fascinating, you know, about our job. The range is absolutely amazing. We can, it can range from a little mole-wreck to a biggest land, animals, lawnmower. That's what makes the work exciting to be able to, for each client, do something really unique. All right, so that product, right, we took sort of the three new heads of the firm, weaved in their commentary and their interviews, brought one of their clients in. There's the film, this is actually, it turns into a nine minute piece that they made kind of longer than what we traditionally do. But it weaves in, it then gets into showing, you know, the cinematography of their actual work. It has a couple more clients, it actually has users that use some of the space. So it's a very comprehensive, overarching story of the firm, of CLR. So next, portfolio segment. As our clients grew our business into, we ended up following them around the globe, that their business model started to influence our business model and how we approached design, and how we approached workplace. And those partnerships still burst today. One of the key things that we learned very early was to be very careful listeners. We've learned a lot from our clients. It's migrated into the way we work and allowed us to serve a much broader set of clients. We wanted to understand what a client's needs were, how we could develop an environment that was a strategic tool for them that allowed them to be more productive, allowed them a better quality of life, and also create a tool that becomes a competitive advantage for them. So this is studios talking about, their corporate office style architecture, and it goes in and then shows you a handful of the projects and buildings. Most of that segment, there was a lot of still images in there, right? There was a lot of still photography. So we tell our clients oftentimes the best image you're gonna get is still the photograph. Photograph is still most likely going to be the best image because the photographer is there to get a handful of images, right? When we go out on site with video production, we're bringing multiple times the amount of equipment that a photographer is bringing on site, right? There's like rigging, there's dollies, there's all kinds of stuff, there's certain motion things. There's tons and tons of equipment that we're bringing on site, which is why video costs a lot, right? Photographers that go out on site and they usually are shooting sunrise, sunset shots. They're getting a handful of select images and then traditionally they're done, right? So use the photos, still have photographs, still get those photographs, but use them in the video. You don't need to overlap them and compete. Yeah, I'll just, I'll stop there. Eventually it'll just all be the same thing, right? I mean, the video is gonna get high enough resolution that we're just gonna be pulling stills from video. So, photographers are coming into our world because they're scared and they're freaked out because photography is being squeezed and more and more people are moving into video. And photographers usually can't light that well, human faces or interior spaces that well for video. That's continuous shots. And they usually can't do sound that well. So it's, but they're coming in, we work with a lot of architectural photographers to collaborate with them because they have a great eye. Next example, Legacy Project. There's no narration in this, in this example. So this is just a quick little vignette, the expansion that just happened down at the Kimbell like a little over a year ago. So, quick shot, very, very, we shot that over two days on site. Very quick production. And then this is a series, this is a series that we've done for the High Line where we actually highlight some of their volunteers. So it's actually some of the people that, the premise of the series is my High Line. So they sort of say what the High Line is to them, which is a great way to showcase the people that use the High Line. So instead of doing a video where the High Line, the leaders of the High Line talk about, the High Line means this to us as the people that made the High Line. Why don't you use the people that use the space to tell your story because they're gonna have a totally different perspective, right? And this is, I'll show it to you and you can get a feel for what that could mean for the organization for the High Line. I love being in New York City. I think it's your only city. But I also love the natural world. I was looking enough to see a kid whose parents fight hard. We all had to garden when we were little kids, so we each had a little plot of land. That was my growing up experience with gardening. And that led to the work that I do as an artist, which is very much involved in the natural world. And that drew me to the High Line. The High Line is my garden. I'm not new to volunteering, I've done a lot. It's a way of giving back to the city, but it's also a way of having a hands-on experience with nature and gardening. Spring cutback is my favorite time of the year. It's after the winter, so it's really exciting to get back. And it's an amazing group effort. And it allows me to use what I know for a greater cause. My name is Ganny Miller. This is my High Line. All right, so series, right? Well, you let the users tell the story because they've got a better story than sort of the top-down design process. So, you know, the sky's the limit, obviously, right? So, you know, I was thinking about sort of as we interact with the other catalyst professors and how we're all such a product of our environments, right? So, I'm coming from New York City. It's cutthroat, it's fast-paced, right? I'm working with huge firms and I'm trying to make production budgets that they can digest, right? And you're like, well, they're the big firms that got money. You know, they do have more than small firms, but, you know, we as a production company are a direct product of working with the type of clients that we work with. So, you know, it's very different than being purely artistic, right? But we see these sort of four formats as just scraping the surface of what is possible. And so, you know, as we work with clients, we sort of try to plant the seed of saying, you know, there's so much more that can be done. Let's just test this out, see what happens, and then let's start actually coming up with a video content strategy. So, if you were trying to pick of what to do, this is my sort of, you should be shooting some documentation in the house right now as an architect, right? And you guys do this in your studio projects, you document it. I'm really driving this home with my class right now. You know, they're doing it in teams of two and one person is shooting and the other person is shooting the shooter, right? So, the other person is actually photographing the person shooting so that we can all learn from the setups. And then the same way as an architect, you need to be documenting your process, right? So, beyond just sort of scanning and taking photographs of your sketches and your models, but get out there and also take some clips and video of the building going up, of it being built. And beyond just sort of like, here's the thing that's broken, this is what's wrong, or here's the nice detail that works, get some broader shots. You know, get the same shot every couple weeks so that you have a way to show the progression of the project so that when you do engage a video company down the road, you have assets, which are critical. So, an in-house option, why would you want to shoot some stuff in-house? Super inexpensive, right? It's very easy to start shooting. It's a great way to create your content now. Capturing your own process. You know, we come back, we come to the firms all the time and like, oh, we want to talk about our process. You know, there's lots of great stunts that we've developed over time to fake the process, right? So, we have like architects that hold up models and stare at them and stuff, you know, draw random stuff, like pointed stuff on the wall. You know, architects of terrible actors and they're like, why am I doing this? You know, I just look like you're normal for five seconds, you know, just talk to the other person about your favorite color, because the auto doesn't matter, right? It just sort of give me some motion, look like you're enjoying yourself, show me what you do. But it's much easier to actually capture that in the moment, right? So, you like, my students are taking photographs the whole week, right? So, we want to document our own process. So, capture the process. Future assets, super critical if you ever work with a marketing department, you know, where's the image for that? There's so many projects that we work on, we get into the edit and they're like, oh yeah, we've got renderings, we've got stuff. And then we get into the edit, we've given them the first cut and we're like, we really need those assets now. Where are those images? Oh, you know, they're like low quality, poor, you know, we demand them at the beginning. So, you need assets still and video. So, steps for doing that. Most firms and folks are somewhat familiar with the DSLR camera, right? So, it's a really nice photo camera that also shoots video. They're amazing. They're super powerful. They're very simple. They don't take that much. And, you know, basically what I'm doing in my course this week is we're learning fairly simple editing techniques. The edit doesn't really need that to be that complex. It's more about capturing the shots. So, get some nice shots. Slap them together, right? With a narrative, a simple narrative, right? It could just be like, this is the progression into the building. This is the experience of being in this building. Tell me the experience of the building. We all love to talk about the narrative of our designs. Just show it in video form with using these simple tools. A fluid head tripod will go a long, long way. They get kind of pricey, but low end, $800, higher end, they get like $2,000 or $3,000. And you do get what you pay for, but it's like $800, $1,500, $2,500. And that's sort of the stages, essentially. But an $800 fluid head tripod will give you those really subtle, slow-moving pan and tilts that all architects love, right? So, just real simple movements. And then if you want to be, you know, push the bounds of time lapse or mode or some way to do time lapse, that's another really easy way to capture. So, you know, firms, a lot of firms have this gear, and if they don't, they'll be getting it. This is, you know, it's going to be common. And, you know, so what we do is we go in and we will, yeah, we actually go in and sort of teach architecture offices how to actually use this equipment and what to actually purchase, depending on what they're trying to do. So, on the other end of the spectrum, you know, going with the production company, if you were, you know, you had your firm and you were like, okay, well, why would we want to go outside of the office to do this? You know, press-worthy content. It's large and complex production, right? There's, we're doing, you know, as we're going to budget last night a production that needs to be done by May because this company's getting an award and, you know, of course the timeline they've been sort of sitting around on doing something with this video for months. We're going to travel, we're going to do all this stuff, so it's, you know, it can get complex when you're doing it in a short period of time. Broad skill sets experience, higher quality of production, sound and lighting, you know, that's where you're still going to need to go with someone professional to be able to do quality sound and to light someone well or a space well. And then quick turnaround steps, which the creative brief is what I'm going to talk about next. You know, these are like the very, very beginning questions of, you know, who needs to be in it, right? Where do you need to go shoot it at? Are there any video examples that you're looking at? There has to be a budget range. Are you talking about like 500 bucks? Are you talking about $20,000? You know, there's a range that you're going to be dealing with here when you go talk to a firm and sort of what's the timeline? And that's some sort of quick production skills from various shoots. I'm not zooming into these because I'm trying to go a little too slow. And then there's obviously sort of a hybrid where you mix the two, right? So you might have the production company come in and train your staff or you shoot some of this yourself and then you hire a production company for certain things. We've done stuff with firms that do a lot of graphics where they'll generate all the graphics and we put them in the edit. There's a lot of back and forth. So then the creative brief. So this is like what you would need to outline if you were going to engage and start working on a video. If you're doing it in-house or if you're going outside of house. And this is sort of a handful of things to do. So what are your goals and expectations? If it's a firm-wide piece, what are your value propositions? What is your claim for the firm? What is the value proposition you're adding here? Is it about the cost? And essentially you want to prioritize this. What's the most important thing? Is it cost? Is it the timing? Is it getting clients? Is it attracting talent? And then overall, what are your long-range goals with this medium? Brand and value propositions. This is more marketing speak that I don't really want to get into. But again, when I was talking about SEO, what are your keywords? What are the keywords that represent your company? This is an exercise that every business should do and this profession does not do. We work with so many markers. I'm like, can you just give me a couple bullets of what your firm stands for? And it's like crickets. It's amazing. And it's kind of terrifying. I mean, design is this sort of ethereal thing and then there's the final product and we show the final product. But what we do as a service, you should be able to communicate why your company and the services that you add are different than your competition. So differentiators. Story, right? The fun part. So beginning, middle, end. It's a typical structure. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. Again, this is baby step stuff. So tell me sort of the format. I showed you four from earlier. Inform and entertain. Entertaining is critical. A lot of videos that we do or the multiple chefs, too many chefs involved, right? You get involved with a lot of like ego architects. Every principal in the firm wants to have, you know, something to get their hooks on. I mean, architects are their own worst clients. Straight up. Everything that an architect like complains about, they do it in multiple folds to everyone that they work with. It's amazing. Like just look at, like analyze how the practice is done. And it's phenomenal. So, you know, so don't just inform and entertain. Don't sort of use video as a, you know, bastardized version of a PowerPoint where you're just talking through video at somebody with, you know, some images. Entertain them. Take them on a journey. Educate them to something. You know, what is your story? What is the essence of this? Again, sort of getting away from the hard sell to the soft sell. Don't talk at your viewer. Show them. Right? That's what people want. You're not making a glorified PowerPoint. Yes. What is the tone? Right? Tone is very critical. The gammy piece was like warm, warm color palette, warm and fuzzy, right? It was like trying to pull you out of the cold, dark winter of New York, right? It was like, I think it was shot right around this time of year at March, right? So they're out in the high line, cutting out of the grasses. We wanted to do a palette that was warm and matched that quality, right? We found a sort of a guitar, plucky, stringy music piece that the composer actually made for that. So it sort of all connected and collected together. So it really helped tell the story of gammy, right? Which was very effective. So the tone, everything that you do is to support that tone. Hook or struggle. We always fight for this and it usually gets thrown out. Like, come on, just tell, is there any tension in this process? What did you overcome maybe in this building? And most architects don't want to sort of talk about the hardships unless you turn the camera off and then that's all they want to talk about. But, you know, it doesn't, I don't want to hear about the thing that you're going to get sued for, obviously, right? Like, oh, there's a leak. Of course, you're not going to put that on camera. But tell me, you know, tell me what were some of the design challenges. This is what is the way to illustrate the value of the entire profession, right? Which is sort of what I'll get to towards the end. And then is there anything that you've looked at, any videos that you like, right? If there's something you're trying to emulate, just like a precedent, you know, include that in your creative brief, in your outline for this video. Stakeholders, this is something that, you know, is another thing that we're constantly fighting for. Architects should not be the ones paying for the videos. All right? That's counterintuitive to what I do every day. The architects are the ones that are hiring us. But slowly and suddenly, we're getting the architects to have their clients pay. We're getting some of the other subs to pay. And you want to think of them as stakeholders. So if you're going to put them on camera, right? Have them throw some money in on this. Share the costs. It's a big, expensive thing for the architects to be doing. They shouldn't be paying for it. Some firms are already starting to use us and basically shop us out, right? They're going to their clients and saying, hey, we can produce a video for you guys, right? So they're upcharging me. I'm cool with that. Do the video, right? It's more sort of in the retail environment because, you know, story and narrative is so critical to retail. And that narrative is very direct and very prescient and, you know, quick and speedy. And there's a lot of money there. So it's a great way to create video content. And there's screens everywhere now, right? So there's screens in every environment that we're in. There needs to be content on there. So you have these surfaces, right? So again, there's just the video content is only going to increase and expand. And another critical aspect of this is you can have multiple edits of the same video. So you can slightly change the messaging a little bit. Spend a little bit more time on the engineer and the engineer gets his own video. His or her own video, right? You get one for the architect. You get one for the client. You know, maybe an organization that also uses the building is involved and they throw a little money in it. It's not difficult to make slight adjustments to the same cut. Interview leads. So who's going to be on camera? And the best way to say this, you know, who needs to be is not always who should be. So you want someone that's passionate. You know, our job is someone that's producing this and directing these shoots. We try to loosen up and liven up the architects that we put on camera as best we can. But a lot of times, a lot of times we're putting someone on camera that doesn't even want to be on camera, right? They're like, why is the marketing department making us do this video? Jesus, okay, what, okay. All right, put me on. You know, just like... So that person, you might know in your office or who you're working with is probably not the person that you might want to spend the most time. Maybe they have to be in there politically for like a snippet, but don't waste a half hour or an hour of an interview time to try to find a jewel out of them. Get the people in your office. Get the users, right? The passionate people that are involved on this project that talk about it. That comes through directly in the messaging of the video, right? It's the same thing as like bad acting. If you're watching a film that has bad acting, all you can see is the bad acting, right? No one that we're putting on camera is an actor. So if they're not talking from the gut, passionately, you are instantaneously bored. So do not put someone on there that's going to bore you. Your clients don't want to watch it. Your talent, future talent doesn't want to watch it. No one cares about someone just going through the motions on video. It's a waste of money. It's a passion entertaining. Moira's not mayor, so you don't need a lot of talking heads. You get sort of lost. Simplify it. A few minutes, a few people. You don't want to go crazy. You can show obviously humans and multiple people, but don't give them a lot of talking space. Don't give them a lower third. You don't want to have too many people introduced and it also explodes your budget. And people love people, right? I mean, architects love buildings, but they also like people in their buildings. And it's a personal pet peeve and I think it's why we're sort of sort of backed into a corner with this industry is that we've done a very good job of dissociating the built environment from people. And we don't show imagery with people using our buildings. And so what a lot of times with our projects I push to actually include the people. Now we don't want messy, you know, we're talking about trash cans today. You know, put the trash can around behind the column so that you don't see it in the shot, but you want to see this building used. All right, faster. We're going to hack off the end of this presentation, guys. So audience, who's the audience who you're talking to? Really importantly, sort of where are they at, both digitally and physically when you get to distribution. But asking your audiences is going to directly impact every single move you do. And, you know, you can cut something for different audiences. You can also, you know, we like to think of the audience as like a target, right? The bull side, there's another ring outside of it. So you have this primary core audience that you're always thinking of and then there's maybe a secondary audience. So the CLR Zoo exhibit design firm, you know, they were doing that to talk to potential clients, which is zoo directors. And that's where they distributed at the National Zoological Conference. But they also, secondary audience, was all these people that work in zoos. So this video got traffic all over these zoo blogs for zoo workers, zoo enthusiasts, because look at this great work that's happening in these other zoos. All of a sudden you have this huge swath of people that are probably not going to be writing the check, but they're the, you know, your name, your firm needs to get out there. And that's going to further increase the profile of your firm, raise you up at SEO, all of that stuff that I've sort of covered. Assets, graphics, again, what do you have already that you can use in the video? So you have models, right? You have sketches. Are they scanned? Do you have computer generated graphics? What format are they? Are they vector? Are they rasterized? You can take that stuff, pool it into After Effects, animated, you know, or choose your favorite program. Are there graphic standards? Is there a sort of certain color palette you're going to be going for in this whole piece? Because that'll impact how you shoot the entire video and sort of what format you shoot it on as far as the compression of the file. So, you know, what is the sort of graphic essence of this? And are there other sort of marketing campaigns or drivers that are happening at the same time? Oh, oops, that's a shift key. Schedule, sort of obvious, you know, when is it going to be done? When can you get to the site? When can you get, you know, be on site? That Campbell video, we shot that opening weekend so that the shades that were coming down, we had to wait a long time to get that to happen because they were still fixing the shades and then we couldn't shoot in the room because of the giant, you know, genie lifts out there, scissor lifts going up to the ceiling to try to fix the shades. So opening weekend is a dangerous time to be there. There's a lot of moving parts. There could be things that aren't fixed, but it's a nice time to get there to get it right when it's opening up, right? So there's a lot of conflicting needs, but, you know, when are you, the architect, allowed to come back on site? You know, and also what's the availability of your interviewees? Maybe there's an event happening nearby that's not going to be there. That's going to make it much more cost-effective to get those interviewees at the same time than doing them individually over different dates and locations. All right, and distribution. I'm not going to get into the case today. There's no way. We have, like, it's five till one, which is later. So I'll just cover a little bit of that here, but distribution, basically, when you make a film, when you make a video and sort of like an indie filmmaking world, basically at this point, you spend about a third of your time after the film is done, still working on the film, and what that is is a distribution, right? So in today's day and age, you actually need to go out there and engage your audience, be a part of the conversation, be there physically, right? It's like taking your video on tour, right? Which is sort of what we did with the documentary film, Art Culture. I went to about over 20 schools, talked in panels about the film, about architectural education, right? That was a way to generate interest in the film, right? And so as that interest is being generated on each campus and each school, more people are finding out about it, more people are posting about it, and it takes a lot of time. So distributing the video, and so when I'm talking about, you know, a couple minute piece that you're doing for your firm, just posting it on YouTube and then putting it on your website is going to disappear, right? You're going to get a handful of views. That's obviously great. If the goal is only clients, then you don't care about views. All right, so let's kill it. All right, so that's distribution and budget, how much are you going to spend and I'm not going to talk about process. I'm going to jump to the end. Pre-production, production. I thought I was going to go through this faster with you guys. Then there's all this distribution outreach stuff. We like distribution. I wasn't even going to go into all this. This was all just, so I can skip ahead. Yeah, what's different? There's a really great case study on YouTube, free YouTube metrics and films. So how do you use all this stuff? Talking about the metrics, you can use it for graphics and ways to illustrate how effective your video is being done. This is everything we covered. And so to wrap this up and so why why do I do this and why do I believe the AC industry that needs to do this? So, you know, I left the architecture not as a sort of conscious way I want to be a filmmaker and I still don't even really want to be a personal filmmaker. I want to make the stories that are built to environment, evident and viewable and engaging and brought to the surface. And I'm from Ohio. I've lived on both coasts and the coasts generally get designed and the culture of what design is is constantly changing. But people still think of architecture built and made and for other people. Generally, you know, when you get out and, you know, it doesn't take far, but you get into the, you know, cruise across the United States and you see the amount of sort of terrible space that we have built for ourselves. And to me my stake in that is I feel that the problem resides in how our industry is telling the story of what we do. And we're not doing it at all. The AIA National just came up with their I Look Up campaign, right? And so, you know, I've been yelling at them for a while saying, you know, there needs to be a campaign and they're trying to make an agenda for this. That's where it should be happening. The AIA should be doing it. It's a professional organization. But the firms, individual firms, they'd be doing a better job of telling the stories behind a built environment and why people should value quality designed spaces. Not just architecture, but an entire comprehensive built environment. So that's my advice. This is us, our local industries and that's me if you want to reach out and ask me any other questions. Thank you guys.