To Slide or Not to Slide, That is the Question: Or, Why PowerPoint Doesn’t Have to Suck.

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.

D-Day for Mercury Marine? Video as Corporate Culture

I was privileged to produce Mercury Marine’s 50th Anniversary video 20 years ago. It was a celebration of an entrepreneur’s vision,  a company’s impact on society, and, in much subtler ways, it’s impact on its surroundings– Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.

The local impact– on employment, community growth, local pride, freshwater recreation heritage– was never pointed out directly. It was there in the amazing visual documentation founder Carl Kiekhafer left behind of his surroundings through 16mm film and pictures. Mercury’s founding in Cedarburg. It’s purchase of the Coriam Farm in Fond du Lac to be the home of it’s amazing growth. It’s incredible impact on watersports, including Tommy Bartlett’s Water Show in the Dells. The national dealer celebrations Mercury hosted in Wisconsin.

I write this because today (Sunday, August 23, 2009) Mercury’s union rank and file will vote on whether to accept concessions in order to keep Mercury’s headquarters and plants in Wisconsin.

I don’t have a bone to pick or a dog in the fight. What I do know is this video demonstrates the incredible impact Mercury’s corporate culture has had on Wisconsin. To see it go the way of so many other corporations that have left, merged, been bought, or otherwise disappeared from the scene would be a distraught moment indeed.

We have short memories, and more and more companies seem to want to forget their past. The man who hired me for the Mercury gig, Ed Huck, often said “What’s past is prologue.” But what prologue is there if you ignore your past?

Here in slightly shortened form, is “50 Years of Leadership.”

The Art of the Interview: How to be Invisible

Interviewing for an audio-visual enterprise is an ancient art.

In a good documentary, the star of the interview is the person being interviewed. The interviewer is typically off-camera, and if the interviewer is really good, you’ll never see them or hear them speak. Why?

They ask questions that get full answers.

The art of the interview has been bastardized by today’s TV performer who wants not only to look handsome or pretty, but also smart. So they ask a lot of rapid fire questions. They’ve only got a minute, and they are thinking Emmy. So these questions contain major hints at the answer the interviewer is looking for.

Interviewer: Tell me about how horrible you must feel now that you’re house has burned down?

Interviewee: I feel bad.

Well, yes. But it can be worse. I often hear local cable interviewers ask the question this way:

Interviewer: The fact that your house burned down must make you feel awfully bad, doesn’t it?

Interviewee: Yes, yes it does.

Interviewer: How bad?

Interviewee: pretty bad.

Pretty bad, indeed.

In a corporate long form documentary style video, an ideal scenario is the video that can be “narrated” solely by the interviewees, through their own words, in complete and meaningful sentences. Suffice it to say that this is hard work. You must ask the right questions in the right fashion and then have the editing chops to put it together into a compelling narrative that has a beginning, middle, climax, and end. The interviewee will not be a talking head on camera, so you have no excuse to make your interviews TV style, where editing would cause unsightly jump cuts (therefore giving the producer an excuse to edit less. More gross profit!)

Some producers will pretend that TV style interviews are the right way to sell business-to-business products and services. That’s ridiculous. Looking at two talking heads blathering on without b-roll, music, or story is an absolute waste of a company’s dollars. That producer has no intention of working for his or her money.

We believe in interview style videos, just as surely as we believe in unstaged actualities to convince audiences of a product’s quality or a company’s intent or philosophy.

Yes, it takes longer, and it costs a bit more. But the shelf life can be very long, and the impact multi-tiered. Its a technique that works at meetings, or on the web. Consider this technique for your next video.

An example can be found by clicking on the image below.

Excerpt from Corporate Founder Story Video

Thoughts on What’s Under New Media’s Hood

I’m about to deliver a presentation in two hours or so. Every Tuesday morning, a group of local business people gather for something called a “BNI” meeting– Business Network International. BNI is a structured networking referral group.

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.

Ed McMahon Taught Me How to Write

When Ric Sorgel and I started Sorgel-Lee in 1972, we didn’t have to worry about voice-over announcers. Our first few jobs were interview style arts slide shows. Point the microphone, ask questions, get answers, edit it into a documentary continuity.

But in the summer of that year, we were asked by Ric’s friend Mike Kiefer (with some influence from Ric’s Dad) if we’d like to produce a slide show touting their company, Kiefer Corporation. A real corporate project! Kiefer sold commercial kitchen impliments and did custom stainless steel fabrication, and they wanted something to show at a trade show.

The answer was yes, the budget cheap, and I had my first real script to write. No relying on other people’s voices, this had to be written for a narrator. And since the budget was cheap, we couldn’t afford– and for that matter, didn’t know– an announcer.

My job was to write the script and produce the soundtrack to which the slides would be edited. And, I agreed, I would read the narration as well.

From an entrepreneurial standpoint, this was perhaps the critical moment in my development as an audio-visual person. My first script, my first narrative soundtrack, and my first (and I hoped, only) voice-over read. How I handled the assignment would define our house style for years to come.

I was a mimic in those days. I did impressions of Ed Sullivan, Jack Benny, George Burns, Kirk Douglas, Johnny Carson…. wait! Johnny Carson, Johnny Carson… Ed McMahon!  Budweiser. Clydesdales. Tonight Show Commercial Reader. Ed McMahon was the answer.

Short sentences, a good theme line, a low key personable approach. Ed McMahon didn’t write what he read, but he made it sound like it. I worked on the script, maybe 3 or 4 pages,  and I remember the final line– it was a direct rip-off of some Budweiser commercial read by McMahon:

” Kiefer Corporation. All… You’ll ever need.”

No explanatories, like “This is Kiefer Corporation, your leader in kitchenware.” No verbs. No complete sentences— and a dot dot dot to guarantee the pause in the right place. Hell, even I could read that, it was so clean.

Which I did. We lived in a one bedroom apartment which was distinguished by the fact that it had one closet for the entire apartment, in the back corner of what passed for a living room.

In that closet was all our earthly possessions, which, given that this was Wisconsin, included a bunch of winter coats. I set up my tape recorder outside the closet, fished the mike cable under the door, attached the Shure SM57 microphone, started the tape recorder and closed the door. I stood in between the coats to insure no reverb or reflections, and also to help give some bass boost to my voice. And I read. And reread. Until I could hear Ed McMahon.

I never read professionally again, but what I had done that day worked beautifully. It helped me define the words I would write, the music I would use, the style of our shows, and the pace of our shows.

It made us a real company, with a real industrial demo to show. It helped put us on the map.

Thanks, Ed McMahon. Your were all we ever needed.

Vintage Milwaukee TV Spots 1970′s Pt. 1

A couple of old commercials from the 1970′s in Milwaukee. Remember Railroad Salvage? Gordon Page?

How to Produce a Video on the Cheap. And, Yes, a “Good” Video.

Video is one of those rare fields that has had a total reboot. It has not been supplanted, replaced, superseded, obsoleted, or died.

It flailed for a bit, while the doctors tried to find what about the web made its parents think it was going to die.

But then Dr. House entered, and declared, “Ahah! It isn’t dying. It is being reborn!”

And it was reborn, in short pants. Younger, leaner, easier to maintain (not as fussy about it’s baby food) and requiring far fewer oil changes.

Have I mixed enough metaphors?

The new video was born of a demand caused by the Internet, and it wasn’t always called video. Sometimes it was “Powerpoints,” or “Decks”, or “Flash shows”, or “Streaming” video. But those were just designer labels.

Wrangler or Dior, it just doesn’t cost as much to make a video, if you do it right.

You will always pay for brains. The theme. The premise. The strategy. the script. (Uh, that’s what I sell, folks.)

But when you can get a high-def camera for 250 bucks, and a a damn good editing program for 100 bucks, and a powerhouse computer off-lease at some corporate slag-heap for practically free—- well now all that matters is that you know what to do with all this firepower.

My advice is go to the best video writer / director in town and yell him you know the secret handshake and get him to work on the cheap. He may just be glad to have the business.

But barring that, and assuming your ego wants to be a part of the wonderful world of video, here’s a few ways to produce a perfectly acceptable video on the cheap.

Start by making a slide show (for more on this, go to my other website, slideshowsecrets.com.) A good slideshow has compelling still images, the occasional graphic sequence, and a great soundtrack. The secret sauce is the soundtrack. There are terrific slide show programs available like ProShow Gold from Photodex for Windows and FotoMagico for the Mac that create incredible moving still image shows that sync precisely to pre-existing soundtracks that output to video and thus create, well, video. They can upload to YouTube, your own hosted site, to a DVD, flash drive, etc.

If you’d like to be working with full motion (more precisely, if you NEED to work with full motion– to show a motion process, to use interviews that MUST be on-camera) there are terrific low-rent video editing programs on both the MAC and PC sides.

For Windows, you can’t go wrong with any of the Sony Vegas family. These allow you to mix stills, motion, graphics, and create a fully sophisticiated soundtrack all within one program. We at VideoStory have used the pro version for years.

On the MAC side, Try combining the iLife and iWork products to create a hell of an arsenal. iMovie 9 allows for simple, intuitive editing. By using the presentation program Keynote for graphcs and effects and outputting to Quicktime for inclusion in your video edit, you’ve just upped the quality quotient by 10. (Please, please, do not tell any professionals I told this to you.)

A lot of these secrets can be found in my new book. “Tribute Videos for Love & Money”, which explores ways talented people with limited knowledge and resources can make great videos. If you’d like a free pre-release copy, just email me at brienlee@slideshowsecrets.com and I will send you a free complete PDF of the book in exchange for your email address for my newsletter. It’s worth it. It’s free.

How to Make Your OnLine Video Go Viral

Ad Age Digital has an insightful article on making your video viral, especially in terms of big campaigns.

The Kind of Video You Need in a Depression: The Tribute

When times get tough, and we examine what’s really important, we realize the importance of friends, family, people and places in our lives.

We take a hard look at the “things” in our lives. We’re quicker to make judgments, and pare back frivolous things, and conserve and treasure more those things that provide the most comfort and respite. For some, they must have books. Others, perhaps movies or music. Some people must have live theater. We make our choices, we make adjustments in our budget, and we we’re happy for what we have.

This past few months created occasions where I realized the importance of one of my favorite kinds of video: The Tribute. “Tribute” is an all-encompassing name that essentially means some form of life story, family history, celebratory story, or honorary review.

It’s what got me into the business. When my father turned 50, I produced a slide show. A simple, single tray click-click that was (however) carefully timed to a full soundtrack featuring his favorite music, recordings of family members past, slides and pictures and press clippings of accomplishments, and even a part narration from a very bad imitator of Howard Cossell.

100 people were in attendance, and I was stunned by the positive reaction. I repeated the technique (this time with two slide projectors and a dissolve mixer to make the picures fade into one another) a few years later for a college event or two, and finally for my sister’s engagement party.

All of these are still dragged out of the closet and rewatched some 40 years later (they’ve been transferred to video, of course). Less and less of the original audience can be in attendance, of course, making these showings even more special. Little did I know what kind of investment they would be– an investment that grew in emotional value year by year.

Nobody lives forever. In the case of my father’s 50th birthday, well, he was gone just 11 years later. My mother died just 5 years after the event. I’m so glad I created that show.

Last fall, my brother, who has produced these kinds of videos since the mid 1990′s, called to say that he had a job he didn’t have the time to handle. Could I do it? I admit it, I asked: “How Much?”

But the how much is never the make or break in these cases. The customers (unless it’s a corporate tribute to a retiring executive) always think the price is too much, and we always think the hourly rate for the effort put into these is way too small.

Enter the recession.

The matriarch and patriarch of The Smith Family (we’ll call them) wanted to encapsulate their “story” for their four children and their dozen or so grandchildren. This was very proactive– they had an incredible wealth of pictures, and a dozen or so 8mm films no one had seen in ages, and in the case of the children (now in their 40′s and 50′s) and grandchildren, perhaps these had never been seen.

We took the approach of interviewing Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Theirs was a WWII romance, s New Jersey story, a suburban sprawl story, and it paralleled the story of the country tremendously. But mostly, there were their memories. Razor sharp, warm, and incisive.

I’m proud of the result.

Then in February, I turned 60 and for the first time ever, someone (my brother) produced a tribute video for me. I was blown away by the surprise, and even more blown away by his work.

Corporate videos come and go. This year’s “Exceeding Your Expectations” becomes last year’s news, management changes, the themes change, and the videos change. “More with the 90′s” becomes “Making it in the New Millennium”.

By families have more permanence. And yet in today’s digital world, who can make sense of, or even physically project, the film and slides and tapes of yesteryear? And beyond that, how do you make it a story?

I know how to– very well, in fact. As I pointed out– I’ve done it, and not just for families, but for corporations, civic leaders, and church dignitaries. Tributes focus on what’s best about people– their upbringing, their character, their accomplishments, their likes and loves, even what they learn from their mistakes. They become stories of character– and that is something companies should afford to pass along from department to department and employee to employee.

In the next few posts, that show the power of the Tribute– how it can emphasize love, prosperity, achievement, togetherness, and purpose.

Perfect for a recession.

Paul Harvey…. Good Day.

Two Paul Harvey stories.

I was working on the 100th anniversary meeting videos for Underwriters Labs. We were going through all of their historical media and found a film from the 1940‘s that was an overview of UL. The narrator sounded familiar. I said, “that’s Paul Harvey.” But we all agreed it couldn’t be Paul Harvey– how could you have those pipes if you hadn’t even broken puberty, we asked?

But it was Paul Harvey.  Already at least a dozen years into his radio career. And we were playing this film nearly 50 years after he had recorded that narration.  And this was in 1993! I’d do the math but it hurts my head.

And….

In 1969, I was the on-stage host, comedian, monologist for Marquette University’s Varsity Varieties, at the then unrestored Pabst Theater in Milwaukee. I did impressions back then. I went for the easy marks– the icons– Ed Sullivan, George Burns, Jack Benny…. Paul Harvey. Today’s audiences might now be quickest to recognize just one of those names… Paul Harvey.

Back then, he had two radio shows, a daily Tv commentary, regular appearances on the Tonight Show— and at 60 years old, he was barely mid-career.He was arch-conservative, had a distinctive voice, and was everywhere. But he was 60.

I made fun of him because I though he was out of touch and washed up.

But “Good Day” never meant “Good Bye”. Until now.

Hey, I’m 60. There may be hope yet!