The Sorgel-Lee Team, circa 1981

• Sorgel-Lee Riordan (aka Sorgel-Lee Multimedia, Sorgel-Lee, and, after I left, Sorgel Studios)
• Brien Lee & Company
• Video Images
• Visuals Plus
• TVL
• Brien Lee Creative Solutions
• Brien Lee VideoStory

In all of these, I had hiring and firing responsibilities.

Most of these were in Milwaukee, with branches or side trips into the Chicago market, as well as New York / New Jersey market, where I am sitting now.

It’s a beautiful, temperate, sunny labor day morning. I’m sitting on the back porch typing, and thinking about a labor day with high unemployment rates and so little corporate reinvestment, in either equipment, outside services, or hires.

I’m looking over a nearly 40 year career and thinking about all the people that made it possible– the staff “laborers” who wrote scripts, mounted slides, directed shows,

Creative Solutions Team, circa 2001

Mark Augustine & friend

went on shoots, retyped scripts, cursed at computers, mixed soundtracks, edited video or film, and developed trusting clients. The people who were on the 24 hour edit benders, some miles from home, miles from the security of s normal job, who made me and our clients look so good. There were hundreds– we hired when the people were right, not the economy.

I think of creative suppliers who took our ideas and melded them into music, or animations, or dramatic footage, and the young “kids” with no resumes we hired who later became superstars in their own right. I’m proud of that.

I’m not going to name names. But do the math– one person was with me for 17 years, helped launch a branch in New York City, and worked on some of the earliest interactive video in history. A few others were with me for five years plus– including one person who pronounced s/he never stayed at one place for more than a year or

two. I guess we kept things interesting. I know we always trusted out employees’ talents.

As time flew by, some went on to start their own companies, or launch new careers in various new fields of endeavor.

They all had once thing in common– they took the work “labor” seriously. They worked hard. Beyond the call of duty. The learned lots, added much, and almost always

Amy and Dan edit a Walgreens spectacular

became better than me at their particular creative specialty.

I also had remarkable business partners over the years. But that’s a different story.

Here’s to hard work and hard workers. Happy labor day, and thank you, fellow workhorses.

Anywhere from 3 to 15 (or more) projectors were focused on a screen, timed to music, with sophisticated graphic effects, photo sequences, title animations all happening in a careful sequence. Timing was precise; manual operation was possible (next slide, please), and even infinite loop sequences for backgrounds or logo animations used during live speaker sequences were possible.

This was in effect a video-like immersive experience for audiences. Sound came off of multi-track magnetic tape recorders, so the sound was full fidelity. Film projectors could be controlled as well. In fact, all elements of a meeting could be controlled via these computer programs– speaker support, multi-image slide shows with sound; film rolls, lights, flash bulb effects, and more.

Why does an old guy like me know computers? Well, I had to program slide shows.

I also had to find a solution to the innumerable script changes I and my clients made.

Before computers, a-v scripts were written on “copy paper” cheap newspaper typing paper that was easy to cut with a ruler. Cutting and pasting was a matter of literally cutting and pasting. Cut the paragraph you wanted to move out of the paper, past it with a big glob of glue past underneath the paragraph were it was destined to go. Because the editing process is very important, my scripts were sometimes hundreds of paper paragraphs reordered and  glued together.

But there were more miracles to come. The popular operating system at the time was CP/M. It was not meant for portable computers but AVL and others (Most notably, Adam Osborne) adopted it for portable and stationary computing. AVL’s computers were at first in a big desk hogging chassis, then reduced to a one piece screen, two drive, computer configuration, and finally, to a luggable portable.

People began putting word processing and accounting programs on their AVL’s, and the personal computer era began. And of course there was Apple. Put a CP/M card in an Apple, and you were able to use WordStar, the word processing giant of the day.

Soon we were using the computer to cut and paste, I was writing a “how to compute” column for A-V / Video magazine, and slides were big business.

But video was coming, and I jumped out of the slide apple cart and into the video fire before other slide producers and began adapting what I had learned producing slides to the art of video.

Pacing, strong soundtracks, good stories– those things never change.

Slides are how we made our money and made our name.

I love slides. Grew up with them, made shows with them., started a business with them, made friends with them, won awards with them.

Today, the word “slides” has a revised but logical meaning: Powerpoint slides (or Keynote, if you prefer.)

On linkedIn, there is an ongoing discussion on whether speakers should uses slides or not. Actually, the very thought is even more daunting to these “Presentation Gurus” (the name of the group): the question was really “Is there ever a time when a speaker shouldn’t use slides?”

Here’s my quick answer:

Average speaker: No. Always use slides.

Good speaker: Maybe, depending on the size of the crowd. But take advice from a pro PowerPoint person or consultant.

Great Speaker: Yes, go without slides if you can see the eyes of everyone in the room. Or….

Great Speaker: No, use slides, if you’re speaking before 500 or up. Great speakers can use slides effortlessly, have slides that are appropriate and not overwritten, probably don’t even look at them during the presentation, and in many cases have an a-v technician changing the slides for him or her.

The best speaker I ever saw– and he always used slides– was former Chairman and CEO of Walgreens Dan Jorndt.

He could hold a room of 5000 or more in the palm of his hand. No podium. He danced across the stage, in a whirlwind of positive thought. His speeches were carefully written, but delivered in a breezy style that allowed for adlibbing, which he often did– or seemed to at any rate.

But Mr. Jorndt had a secret weapon. Behind the screen, or in the booth, and– for much of his career– behind a computer, was the head of the Walgreens Meetings and Media department, David Harnish. David is an important person at Walgreens. I fear the executives still don’t know HOW important. He is the keeper of the flame, the corporate culture, and the internal audio-visual face of Walgreens. He knows video, interactive, asset management, and of course, slides. And he knows creative communications as good as any client I ever had.

A blank slate: the PowerPoint Editing Interface

Slides more recently means PowerPoint.  But David started at Walgreens literally making “real” physical slides, first primarily on an early computer graphics system using Zenographics software, later  via video on the TVL electronic presentation system, and today, on PowerPoint. Don’t get me wrong: David no longer pushes buttons; but he continues to set the standard for how slides should support speakers, not dominate them.

He knows how many words to use, what photos or graphics are necessary, and what fonts work and don’t work. He knows layout and balance, much of it which might “break the rules” of the way PowerPoint wants you to lay things out.

Whether it was multiple slide projector speaker support, or TVL electronic slide speaker support, videodisc, or PowerPoint speaker support, David and Dan Jorndt made each other look great.

Now understand, I think Dan is a great speaker without slides. But with slides? oh, my.

So, to slide or not to slide, that is the question. When you’ve got a great speaker and a great support team, the answer isn’t so black and white.

I didn’t think information could come in spurts as short as a tweet. I forgot about something called telegrams.

I didn’t think about the web as a social place. Yet I’m as old as Walt Mossberg and used to hang out in the same “forums” on Compuserve and The Source.

And I didn’t see it as the ultimate distribution tool for video…. well, I did, but I didn’t expect it to kill off DVD’s and cd-roms. Now we urge our clients to create video just for the web– video that doesn’t even have to go “viral” to do the job. Just find your niche.

A lot of potential users of video on the web don’t get it, so they don’t use it.  They can’t understand the technology, or can’t envision a world beyond cable TV, DVD, or even giant sales meetings. And a good video might cost the same as a basic website, so they put the horse before the cart. These days, you need both– they are synergistic beyond belief.

So you’ve got to believe in the potential of what you don’t know– even if you can’t see what’s in front of your nose.

You can’t be aware of everything. But you can rely on the expertise and experience of good consultants to help point you in the right direction.

Brien Lee (that’s Brien with an “e”, in case you want to call or write. Really, we can see the future– we think.)

We have about 20 members in our group, which means that each individual gets to make a ten minute “pitch” three times a year on what kinds of referrals would be good for their own business. It’s hyperlocal, which is good in general, but probably not perfect for me since my goods (custom meetings, videos, DVDs, Web Video and Web Sites) tend to be somewhat higher ticket.

We meet at Cafe Verde in Phillipsburg, NJ, which is a very nice place, and also happens to be a client. We started working on a video / web marketing package for them about a month ago. And this is NOT a high ticket relationship, but it is an important one. It is a proof of concept relationship. The web+video marketing combo relies on a lot of things, all of which are defined by the fact that the web is somewhat measurable, search rankings are somewhat controllable, and video is turning out to be a key component to succeeding in defining success in measurement and ranking.

I’ve been through a lot of media in my career: slide-shows, multi-image extravaganzas, filmstrips, industrial theater, video for meetings, multi-screen video, electronic presentations, visual databases, “Instant” a-v’s for meetings with early electronic recordable still cameras, panoramic video through anamorphic shooting and playback, PowerPoint, interactive cd-roms and DVDs, and even custom video-on-demand,  e-learning and content management systems.

Always about a year too early. So we’ve got some arrows in our back, but we broke a lot of ground and can claim we were among the first in many of these areas.

My company has done web sites before– plenty. But my company was bigger back then. It was a different time. The bandwidth wasn’t there for video, there was no such thing as WordPress, FrontPage was the “mature” web development software, and Dreamweaver was on V1.0.

That meant that web sites were expensive, and not very creative. They took a lot of programming, and if you weren’t careful you could lose your shirt. The emphasis was on the back end, and it’s endless pursuit of perfection, and I was a front end kind of guy. Content, Creative, Design… then execute.

It seemed we sold  something, then almost immediately started to program. The programming applications had some flowcharting visualization built in, but all of it was in the hands of one person– approvals were therefore difficult, changes were plenty, and projects seemed endless. It was all in one person;s head.

Doing a DVD was a bit different for me. Being, in fact mostly video, and being a pretty straightforward (IF GRUELING) programming process, we were better able to visualize how the DVD (or cd-rom) would work. We used flowcharts, and those flowcharts were created by our writers, who had to build the sales and persuasion logic that drove the whole process to begin with.

Besides, we had been down this road before, so we knew what to do.

Writer always made us different. That we didn’t realize the important role writers could play in the architecture of the web was understandable. The web was links, clicks, pictures, some copy blocks, or a lot of fill in the blanks surveys or grabbing data from here and showing it there. I know. We even built our own e-commerce system.

Years have passed, the web has matured, there’s tools for everything, and advertising and Google’s role in the web have brought standards and measurements to the field very reminiscent of magazine and newspaper readership studies. There has also emerged a standard language for building websites, and the bandwidth is now such that, thanks to YouTube and other video hosting sites, video is the big gorilla carrying viewership and search optimization on its back.

Welcome home.

The video web combo offers bang for the buck unlike we’ve seen in the past 20 or so years. One way of controlling costs of course is to plan. That we have always done, and it’s not surprising that our tool-set for this is very familiar:

• Strategize
• Outline
• Propose
• Quote
• Wireframe
• Site-map
• Copy Blocks
• Art Direction
• (APPROVAL)
• Refine art & copy
• Create graphics and videos
• Webisize.

Okay, “webisize” gives the work done by the web designers and programmers short shrift.

But what good local sight needs today is efficiency, gravity, personality, and constant change. And all the Flash in the world can’t provide the juice to pump up the search engines.

Content can. Video Can. Change can.

That’s the Video Trojan horse. Used to be, to sell big videos we had to sell big meetings. Now, to sell video, we sell web sites. A well produced video on the web is gold. it is sticky, has personality, gets the communications job dome quickly in site and sound, and can be parceled out at the right place on the site at the right time.

We have a very well developed “wireframing” process for our web sites and interactive projects. But, being around for a while, we didn’t just learned the logic of interactivity yesterday.

Many years ago, we produced some of the first interactive laserdiscs in the world in conjunction with AT&T and Bell Labs. They provided the hardware and the operating system for their hardware, we provided the finished laserdiscs, all carefully branched out interactively, just like one of today’s DVD’s or websites.

Here is the end result:

One of the First Interactive Video Projects, by Brien Lee & Company for AT&T

We didn’t have flowcharting software; heck Microsoft Word didn’t even exist and we were just a year or two beyond typewriters. So, here is what it took to get it there:

Tim Dodge and Brien Lee review their "living" flowchart

A flowchart. made of masking tape and a large empty room.

And it worked.

Proving once again, content is king.

There were something like 150 videos produce for those laserdiscs– all small segments like you might see today on YouTube. It was the beginning of short attention spans.

Without a detailed written guidepost plan, I don ‘t see how we could have done it. We used three different facilities in New York City, two writers, two producers, and dozens of support personnel. That’s what video was like in those days, plus laserdisc production was a very tightly controlled process– high quality, clean rooms, test pressings, on and on.

Once the laserdiscs were done, the AT&T engineers had to program their secret code into their secret computers to make the discs work with their secret playback systems. We didn’t have much contact with them, because they were protecting their proprietary code,  but they had our flowcharts, and they told us that the flowcharts and script segments were detailed enough that they could handle it on their own. Saving, I’m sure, hundreds of hours of miscommunication had we not had all the documentation.

Lesson learned. And not the hard way.

Today, outside of some of the more sophisticated shooting or 3d animations, the whole job could be done by two people and a couple of powerful enough laptops. Naturally, we’d use DVD, or hard disc, or even solid state drive. The intelligence could be programmed into the DVD, or the whole thing could be put on the web with a combination of flash, video, html and perhaps php. And the code is no longer proprietary, or at least a secret. You just have to buy off-the-shelf software.

But you have to be proud of the fact that our people– Linda Duczman, Lora Keller, Tim Dodge– went into the project with a plan we all developed. (And came out of it alive!)

It guaranteed success, and we do like to guarantee success.

Search engines love video. And search engines love links. If your video is on YouTube or another free video hosting site, and you embed the video in your website or blog, Google likes that.

The web loves video. There is video everywhere. Most of it I wouldn’t dream of watching on a large flat panel display; but one out of ten is very good indeed and works to sell the concept or product the website is selling.

So a great video gets you a lot of mileage– on the web, on the flat panel display, on the big screen in a big meeting, or on your iPhone for a quick sales pitch on the 8:15 from New Haven.

So which comes first? Well, they both take time to do right. (Exception: webcam updates are allowed, but NOT as your main video.)

In fact, consider how they will work together. Where will video do a better job than words? Where will words and art prevail?

It’s a planning phase you can’t ignore– we call it Strategic Digital Marketing.

Tribute videos are how I got my start. (See “AVSquad” in the links.) And they remain the most satisfying of the work that we do. There is nothing like telling a people story.

A lot of people are into video these days, some as a hobby, some as a potential profession, some as part of their job duties. There is a perception that video is easy, thanks to point and shoot miniature cameras, computer editing, and thousands of tipsters on-line telling you how easy it is and selling something– usually hardware.

But hardware is only part of the problem, and hardware and editing software are covered pretty readily via training web sites, DVD lessons, and more.

No one is training people on how to tell a compelling story. How to interview, how to move pictures, how to choose music, how to pace videos, how to get a visceral reaction from an audience!

That’s where “Tribute Videos for Love & Money” comes in.

Tribute Videos for Love & Money

It’s an ebook that details my communications beliefs and systems. If you like samples of my work, and you want to know how and why certain creative decisions were made, this is the place to start. It concentrates on the “Tribute” people story type of video, but frankly, if you can tell that kind of story, there isn’t much you won’t be able to do as you grow your capability or career.

For more information, go to videostoryschool.com.

I hope you like it and find it valuable.

Throughout my career, I’ve heard time and time again, “We didn’t budget for this…”, as if that was sufficient justification for me to cut prices.

But of course, as the exception, you know it doesn’t work that way. When there’s a line item foer the kind of thing we do in your approved budget, things move along a lot faster, and without additional justification to upper management. So you’re good to go, the minute you’re ready and the demand is there. (Your bosses like to see action, after all… how does that go– “Look busy”?)

Budgeting a video is a tricky process, because it’s all based on the amount of footage you shoot, and the kind of footage you shoot. Controlled, short (one or two days) shoots make for controlled, reasonably fast edits… perhaps this is a new product video and it’s mostly close-up tabletop work.

A history of the company, or a plant tour, or an overview of the entire operation may be a different story. Multiple shooting days, or weeks, combined with a desire to tell the best story ever about OUR GREAT COMPANY, Inc., will conspire to drive the price up. Not unreasonably, mind you– it’s all about the time it takes to do the job.

I’m convinced that professional buyers know what professional video producers and agencies need financially to do a job that meets the buyers’ expectations. I’m also convinced that when the project has not been budgeted for, they will find it necessary to “negotiate”. The problem is that this may eliminate the most credible and accomplished vendors. The  buyer is willing to make that sacrifice because they don’t want to go to the boss with an unbudgeted expenditure, and the lower the expenditure, the less the job impact. But what is sacrificed?

What about the positive impacts on your career? When you hire the right creative video producer, you’re often on your way to having a major message impact on your company (really, call and I’ll give you examples.)  And that can mean big things for you. Budget shouldn’t get in the way. And it won’t, if you’ve thought ahead.

The smartest buyers I’ve worked with investigate the cost of various kinds of projects before budgets are submitted. Granted, for the production company, that might be frustrating because it can mean a 4 or 6 month wait before anything gets going. But when it gets going, you won’t be playing a game of sticker shock driven ” I didn’t budget for that”, “well, maybe we can cut out some graphics”, “can you do this cheaper and we’re pay you more on the next job”, et. al.

You can do the job that will accomplish your goals, get you applause and recognition, impact the company’s bottom line, and impact yours as well.

That’s why we do no obligation creative proposals. We scope out the video or multimedia project or website or meeting, define as much as we can, and quote a turnkey “put it in the budget” figure.

You have to start somewhere. It might as well be ahead of the curve. That puts you a couple of major step closer to success.

What is universal search?

Basically, it means when your customer searches for a concept you’re interested in, like “bronze widgets”, the items returned as top results will include web sites, videos, and other multimedia links. As importantly, usage of video or presentations on a website will up their visibility to the search engines.

The bottom line is that if you’re selling bronze widgets, you really ought to consider doing a video about your widgets, your company, or your new products– or all of them.

And I know just the guy to do them for you– me.

Check out a sample below.