Creating entertaining videos can at times be a tedious, frustrating, and non-pleasant activity. There are ways to have more fun while creating videos with your team members, and I’ve outlined 3 of them below.

1. Build your team carefully – Anything in life is more fun when you are around individuals that you get along with, who share your values, and who have an engaging personality. Every time one of my friends tells me that he or she hates their job, it almost always comes down to dis-liking their co-workers. Associate with solid people, build teams that possess good chemistry, and you will have more fun while getting better video production results.

2. Have the right tools, equipment, and software – Have you worked with video cameras, sound equipment, lighting, or video editing software that sucked before? Not too much fun is it! If you don’t have the products needed to get a video project done smoothly and successfully then attract team members who can contribute what’s needed.

3. Choose your projects wisely – Time is such a precious commodity in today’s fast paced digital media age. So why waste time on video projects that are doomed from the start, are clearly going to be no fun, and even if completed will get next to no views or tons of thumbs down as ratings. If you are a video creator please be sure to start with solid ideas, concepts, and scripts. If you can’t get excited about the project you want to develop, then how do you expect to inspire anyone else to?

Have more fun creating videos by using our Spidvid platform and leveraging our community.

Have a 4th way to add that will offer more good times when creating videos? The comments are yours below!

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Announcing the 2nd annual Buttered Corn on the Cob Film Festival which we are proud to sponsor again this year!

What is this film festival all about? The Buttered Corn on the Cob Film Festival is a young film festival that will highlight independent films from around the corn fields of the Midwest. The film festival is to honor the independent drive Film Makers of the Midwest have to create films without the support of the Hollywood machine. All the films shown will have no funding from Hollywood and will have a completely independent voice. The Buttered Corn on the Cob Film Festival will also be a chance for film makers of the Midwest to come together and network together, thus improving their ability to make impressionable films.

The 2012 event is on April 15th in Urbana, IL, submissions are free and will be accepted until February 20th, 2012. If you have a web series, a short film, or a feature length film, you can submit your content here. There are some great prizes to be won including a feature across our entire network for all winners! Here are the winners from last year, and below is our personal favorite entitled “Bedtime For Timmy” which is a very cute short animated film by Thomas Nicol.

Bedtime For Timmy from Thomas Nicol on UnleashVideo

We are proud to be a sponsor of this fun, new, and exciting film festival, not just because of the event itself but because of the wonderful people behind it too. Cheers to the filmmakers, viewers, organizers, and everyone else involved with Buttered Corn on the Cob Film Festival, 2012.

How does a video creator or filmmaker get maximum value out of Spidvid’s community and platform? A great question that we’ve been getting a lot lately, and a question that certainly deserves a public answer to. So without further ado…

6 ways to win on Spidvid:

1. Create your Spidvid profile. Before anything can happen you need to get an account, and spend a few minutes on it to make sure it’s complete and interesting for our community to visit. If it doesn’t kick a** and inspire other filmmakers to connect with you, then you need to improve it ASAP! Here’s a good one to check out.

2. Post a project. Now that you have your remarkable profile created you can post a collaborative video project. The project should tell its unique story, communicate to our community who you’re looking for, where the project is in development, and the other important details that everyone needs to know about.

3. Bid on a project. If you aren’t a filmmaker, but are an actor, screenwriter, editor, or another type of talent then you can bid on Spidvid projects. Be sure to pay attention to where the core team is creating the video. For example, if you’re an actor that’s based in Miami but the shoot is in LA, then you will need to travel for the live shoot to be part of the project. But if you’re an editor based in London then you can perhaps be part of the post-production team.

4. Connect with our community. Our Spidvid community is full of award winning filmmakers, actors, writers, and directors so there is lots of remarkable individuals out there to connect with, learn from, and perhaps collaborate with on future projects. Get some conversations started today!

5. Connect with us. Follow us on Twitter, fan us up on Facebook, subscribe to our blog, or email us (community@spidvid.com) to get the most out of your Spidvid experience. We will point you in the right direction, try to hook you up with project funding or donate to your Kickstarter campaign, connect you with talent you need for your project’s success, or whatever else you may need, we exist to empower our community to thrive in new media filmmaking!

6. Complete a project, ship a video. By building your team on Spidvid, collaborating on the video project, and completing it so you can upload the video for distribution is the ultimate success and win on our site. Every time a project gets posted we always do our best to help teams form which are capable of reaching viral success upon successful execution.

Will update this post as other’s give us a #7, #8, and hopefully one day #100.

Also, we’re looking for someone to design an infographic for Spidvid which beautifully displays current accomplishments by our community to show our overall progress to date. If you can design art like this please get in touch.

Stay updated on all the new Spidvid projects from our community by getting our blog delivered to your email inbox, or read it in your favorite RSS reader.

You’ve likely never heard of Illinois-based Buttered Corn on the Cob Film Festival before until just now.

What is this film festival all about? The Buttered Corn on the Cob Film Festival is a young film festival that will highlight independent films from around the corn fields of the Midwest. The film festival is to honor the independent drive Film Makers of the Midwest have to create films without the support of the Hollywood machine. All the films shown will have no funding from Hollywood and will have a completely independent voice. The Buttered Corn on the Cob Film Festival will also be a chance for film makers of the Midwest to come together and network together, thus improving their ability to make impressionable films.

The 2011 event is on April 3rd in Urbana, IL, and below outlines how the day will unfold.

Buttered Corn on the Cob Film Festival

2011 Festival Listing

2:00pm International Showcase

Wolke Jacob Seifert Bastlerz

Lokschupen Jacob Seifert Bastlerz

Implants Pardis Parker Flying Dish Productions

Afghan Pardis Parker Flying Dish Productions

Two Men, Two Cows, Two Guns Pardis Parker Flying Dish Productions

Run Granny Run Nikolaus von Uthmann Envy You Productions

3:00pm Feature Film Showcase

Connor’s Woods Joe Taylor Sleep Creek Films

Dark Matter (Best Feature Film) Tye Wilson Broken Shadow Entertainment

6:00 Short Film Showcase I

Cannibal Caverns Ian Havermale

The Jersey Devil Jon Klemke & Nick Nylen OOO, Candy Productions

The Magician’s Box Ash Ahrens Ash Fire Films

Two Rows In Bob Zimmerman R.A.Z. Films

7:00 Short Film Showcase II

With Me Now Sasan Shabrou Gladius Arts

His First Day Brian Rose

Mogul Tye Wilson Broken Shadow Entertainment

Heart Candy Tye Wilson Broken Shadow Entertainment

Cemetery Blues Matt Packman Legacy Pictures

8:00pm Short Film Showcase III

Back Home Tye Wilson Broken Shadow Entertainment

The Last Ride Sasan Shabrou Gladius Arts

8:30pm Best of the Festival Showcase

Bedtime for Timmy (Juror Pick) Thomas Nicol Unfocused Films

Broken Dolls (Best Short Film Non International) Kevin Sedall B.S.E.

Afghan (Juror Pick)

Two Men, Two Cows, Two Guns (Juror Pick)

Run Granny Run (Juror Pick and Best Film in the Festival)

We are proud to be a sponsor of this fun, new, and exciting film festival, not just because of the event itself but because of the wonderful people behind it too. Cheers to the filmmakers, viewers, organizers, and everyone else involved with Buttered Corn on the Cob Film Festival, 2011.

Karim Kanji is a man of many talents; including the host of the Social Media Show, and co-founder of ThirdOcean which is a social media, marketing, and community consulting startup.

Karim and his guest Karim Awad discussed companies to watch out for on the Social Media Show, and selected Spidvid as one of them. I have posted the clip where Spidvid is mentioned and explained quite well by Karim (Kanji). Enjoy, spread the word, and enjoy your weekend. Oh, and if you want to listen to the full 46 minute podcast, here’s the link to it.

Spidvid on Social Media Show by spidvid

And as Karim mentioned I’m now actively seeking out a tech co-founder (rock star developer/hacker) and angel investors, so if you are either or know people who fit one or the other description, then please get in touch and let’s have a chat.

The ability for people to connect and create something greater than themselves is the essence of any successful collaboration.  From film to art to music, let’s take a look at 3 successful collaborations that each have their own interesting spin on working together.

A Film Collaboration

“The collaboration project is a game we tried in which all of us would individually have all the power of directing, writing, and editing over only one scene. Each person would have to somehow continue from the last scene, and no one else could interfere with the each others part. (via thenerfherders – http://www.youtube.com/user/thenerfherders)

COMBO – a collaborative animation by Blu and David Ellis (Art)

A collaborative animation by Blu and David Ellis from 2009. (via notblu – http://www.youtube.com/user/notblu)

Caledonia Collaboration Project (Music)

A music collaboration by over 20 YouTube composers. (via Collaboration2010 – http://www.youtube.com/user/Collaboration2010)

Enjoy those videos, and if you have a comment about them or about collaboration in general, feel free to join the conversation by posting your comment below.

A few short years ago an entrepreneur couldn’t build and scale a successful tech or media company without raising millions of dollars in venture capital funding. The same can be said about a video creator or filmmaker where they couldn’t create a hit show or film without the resources that a corporate studio provided. Fast forward to 2010 where we are seeing many startup companies and films succeeding without the support of big corporate money. I don’t know what you think about all this, but to me it’s truly refreshing to see new possibilities and opportunities, and to watch as the business and media industries rapidly change like never before. Look no further than Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook as I believe that he’s the poster boy for the new generation of business visionaries, innovators, and leaders.

Our vision is to grow Spidvid into the web’s open video production ecosystem where individuals share and aggregate their talent and resources together so new video entertainment can be created. Studios are still needed for the most part to develop and promote feature films, but many top web series and short videos/films of the future will be the result of collaborative teams that crowdsource their funding, and leverage new marketing tools at their disposal for free.

I thought up this connection between studios and venture capitalists the other day when I was working out, and couldn’t resist writing a post about it. I’m both an optimist and evangelist when it comes to new media and business, and it’s very exciting because we’ve never seen the world transform so drastically so fast like we are today. This post is a bit random, but I hope it provided some good food for thought.

I had the opportunity of joining Marc and Brett last week as a guest on their podcast “Web of Intrigue” and had a blast. We talked about Spidvid, open video production, new media, branded entertainment vs ads, and the online video space.

These guys are doing some big things in online video through their Fresh Baked Entertainment studio, and have a new web series (sponsored by VH) which is being very well received, see the trailer below for Life Unjarred.

If you are interested in the topics that we covered, want to hear what I had to say, and as a special bonus hear Marc and Brett pick on each other, then be sure to listen to the show below. If you have any comments be sure to include them below, or get in touch with an email or tweet us.

Thanks gentlemen, and thanks to their supporting cast Brendan and Kaylen for making this all possible!

If you’re in the video production industry perhaps you have wondered, ”how can my team create higher quality content out of the limited amount of time we have for each project?”. I have put together a compact list of three hints for how to successfully complete your projects in 24 hours or less. These tid bits of wisdom include: the importance of connecting with quality people to form a quality team, how to create a video fast, and how to allocate your time to maximize your end results.

Step 1 – Put together your team

Your team members should be reliable people that you trust, know where their specific talents lie, and can rely on them to do a great job. Make sure you know where your team members are located and what time zone they’re in, don’t waste too much time on conference calls or group Skype discussions, and be sure that everyone is very clear on what they are expected to contribute to the project. And treat every member of your team like they are absolutely integral to the success of the created video, people tend to exert more effort when they’re appreciated.

Step 2 – Create the video

The next and second most important part of the project is the process of planning out, shooting, and editing the video. Some people think that between these three elements you should allocate an equal 1/3 of the project’s time to each, but the fact is you will burn most of your time shooting the video and post-producing after. Have a good story written but be flexible to adjust the script and dialog according to the actors and director on the set, because things will always change on shoot day. Spend the most time on making the key seconds and moments in the video as remarkable as possible, and entertain the viewers early on to keep them sticking around for more. Over 50% of video viewers leave in the first 10 seconds, so make your impact on them quickly.

Step 3 – Manage your time wisely

24 hours goes by pretty fast, especially if some of them are spent sleeping. You have to keep tracking your team’s progress every hour or so, but don’t over obsess in this area or time will be wasted on plan management vs actually creating the video. Be relentless during pre-production to be sure that everything is ready to go from the moment you start filming, actors know their lines inside and out, equipment is functional, the location or locations are setup, and the project workflow is easy for everyone to follow. There are lots of variables when it comes to time management, and there will always be things that pop up which you didn’t initially plan for, so set aside at least 10% of total project time for the unexpected extras. In post production every team member should get time to review the project and voice their own opinions to increase the content’s quality, so be sure to set aside a few minutes to create a clear path to a successful project conclusion.

You can do it

There are many other things you can do to create quality video entertainment fast, but hopefully these tips will get you headed in the right direction when working on a tight deadline. If you already have a production project on the go you can manage it via Spidvid’s collaborative production platform. Or if you need to build a new team then grab a free account and invite your members to connect with you in our social network, or find new talented individuals to collaborate with in our community.

Have another tip to add for video production under extreme time constraints? Share one below with a comment.

We are publishing our first ever newsletter next week which will be packed full of goodies, if you aren’t already subscribed what are you waiting for? Get the Spidvid newsletter delivered to your inbox on your computer or mobile phone.

Every wildly successful company ever built has one thing in common with all the rest, that is they have talented people. Up until this point most of the people behind Spidvid have been engineers and developers who have programmed code to bring to reality my vision for the platform.

There are many features and functionalities lined up for the future, but the core development is pretty much complete. So now it’s time to really start attracting our early adopter user-base, getting these members to actively post or bid on projects, and helping to promote the video and film content which gets created by our community.

Over the last couple weeks I’ve been speaking with a guy who knows both community building and media very well. I’ve been looking for someone who not only has experience in marketing and media, but one who has been a hard working entrepreneur and who can relate to the startup company culture. There never seemed to be a really good fit until I was connected to Adam Klein through the online talent recruitment service Solvate.

Adam officially started yesterday and will post updates on our Facebook page, collaborate with me on the soon to be released Spidvid newsletter, attract new members through LinkedIn, connect with bloggers, and come up with interesting blog ideas to write about and share with you all here.

Like myself, Adam is also a big fan of marketing and leadership guru Seth Godin which has value because he shares best common practices with me when it comes to marketing, and community building. And with a guy who drinks out of a “HERO” mug, how can I go wrong?!

Welcome to the team Adam, I know you will play a key role in growing and activating the Spidvid community.