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Posts Tagged ‘empowering’

How Video Creators Can Partner With Talent

December 11th, 2009

partnerships

What you typically see today in the video creation process are video creators and producers paying out money in hopes of seeing a good ROI on their content investment, within a few weeks or months down the road. One of the largest expenses if not the largest expense are individuals who make the real magic happen. This is expected because having the best cameras, lighting, and sound equipment is important but without the right combination of talent using those assets it’s all worthless.

The model that most creators and producers use is to pay out money for everything, retain 100% ownership in the video content, and work hard to at least break even, and ideally turn a profit. But what happens when creators and producers view the individuals on their production team as partners (giving each member or key members a small content ownership stake) instead of employees? The result is that these individuals now have a vested interest in seeing the video content succeed, and are even more motivated to do a remarkable job.

Traditional actors, directors, writers, and story tellers may see this approach as more risky because they aren’t being consistently paid like they are used to, but the concept of building up content equity that could return a far higher amount (over time) than they would get from a paid contract has to be intriguing. And it also helps to build up their content portfolios which can act as valuable leverage for other future opportunities.

It vastly reduces the financial risks on the part of creators and producers because each individual member invests their time with the optimistic belief that financial compensations will come their way as the content goes through the distribution and monetization process. This leaves the creator to only have to spend money on the things that aren’t human beings. Now planning those production budgets have to sound much more fun than crunching all the numbers for each employee and contractor on the team.

Active people in the video production space may not like the approach mentioned here because they like their safe paychecks, but Spidvid has been developed and targeted towards the new crop of up and coming star actors, directors, writers, and story tellers, who want low barriers to entry with lots of potential upside.

Spidvid levels the playing ground for anyone who believes that he or she can add value to the video production process, and the end result which is the quality content. After speaking recently with a friend of mine who’s a real estate agent, he made it clear to me that he wanted a Spidvid beta invite because he believes that his writing ability is pretty good and so writing a script for a short film peaked his interest. His script without individuals to carry out his story has a low amount of value and can get little traction, but because he can connect with the talent he needs on Spidvid his video can actually get produced, and that’s something very exciting for him. I’m sure there are stories like this all over the place and it will be interesting to see how other types of people with day jobs feel about the new opportunities within the video entertainment space.

If you are a creator or producer who would like to partner up with individuals then Spidvid would be valuable to you, and if you are an individual looking for a production team to join then you may also fit well within our community. Visit our site, click the ‘join our video production community’ on the left hand side and provide us with your email address. We send out the first batch of invites next week so be sure to have your name included on our request list.

Jeremy Campbell Visionary , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Social Networks vs Spidvid’s Social Network

August 28th, 2009

Social Networks vs Spidvid's Social Network

Online social networking sites are excellent for communicating with friends (like on Facebook), having conversations and sharing media with people who are interested in the same things you are (like on Twitter), and connecting with professionals in your industry (like on LinkedIn).

Traditional social networks have many great benefits to offer, but for the most part don’t focus on offering exciting opportunities such as team building to achieve common collaborative goals. I believe that the next evolution in social networking is to empower individuals to accomplish tasks and projects, and to reward the deserving individuals for the content that gets created as a result.

So another way to think of Spidvid is as a social network with the purpose of allowing individuals to form teams, collaborate to create and produce quality video content, and credit those who invest their time and talent into the content.

Jeremy Campbell Illustrations , , , , , , , , , , ,

Distribution of Video Content From Spidvid’s Community

August 14th, 2009

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been outlining Spidvid’s media model, and how the video creation and production community can benefit from leveraging it. Today I want to discuss where the content is uploaded and distributed to.

Spidvid remains in private beta so testing is being done with our parent company’s video sharing website UnleashVideo.com. As we move further into our beta we will be developing partnerships to broaden our distribution, analytics, and monetization ecosystem.

It’s still very early on so Web distribution is our key focus initially, but as the community and content network grows we will be working to expand beyond the Web to mobile, and broadband TV. Wherever the viewing audience seeks out videos, our community’s content will be readily available to consume.

Our goal is that by late this year our site will move from a private beta to a public beta, opening the door to many more exciting opportunities for our members, and the quality video content that they create.


Jeremy Campbell News , , , , ,

What Video Production Studios Are

August 14th, 2009

I saw an interesting interview a couple of weeks ago that featured an online video company CEO. What he said in the video was that video production studios are pretty much just banks which happen to invest in creating video content.

Here’s what I believe video production studios are:

1. Investors in creating, distributing, and marketing video content.

2. Connectors of individuals to form teams capable of undertaking their projects.

3. Buildings that have sets so videos can be shot.

4. Buyers of equipment (i.e. cameras), tools, props, and software.

Here’s how I believe collaborative video production teams can successfully operate:

1. Socially connect on Spidvid which empowers individuals to self-organize and form their own custom teams. Leadership is important to accomplishing this, so each project starts with the video creator.

2. A lot of individuals in the production industry have access to inexpensive but powerful tools. HD cameras for example can now be purchased for a few hundred dollars, and software technology such as Final Cut Pro also falls into this category. What once used to be considered barriers to entry for these people, are now commodity products available to pretty much anyone with an interest in using them.

3. Thanks to green screens, a simple set can now consist of a small sized living room located inside a house.

4. Funding is the largest obstacle in this model, but some very good quality content has been produced using shoe-string budgets, or in some cases for a cost of zero dollars. Financial options are available including corporate sponsorships, small investments coming from the creator and/or rest of the team, and community crowd-sourced funding where a few hundred or thousand people each donate say $1 each.

The big point that I’m trying to outline is that the traditional video production studio model is not as defensible as it once was. For further reading please check out our ebook manifesto entitled “Hollywood Is Doomed – The Rise of Collaborative Creation Teams”.


Jeremy Campbell News , , , , , , ,

Hollywood is Doomed

August 13th, 2009

I have recently written and released an ebook manifesto and released it to DocStoc, Scribd, and Issuu. It’s entitled “Hollywood Is Doomed – The Rise of Collaborative Creation Teams” and it discusses how the traditional video entertainment studio model is losing its appeal as talent connects together on a large scale avoiding the corporate structure. This empowers individuals to form their own production entities, and create a social movement towards a more open and collaborative video creation ecosystem.

I tried to embed the document directly into this post but was unsuccessful, so if you’re interested in reading the 30 page manifesto I encourage you to visit one of the above links to view and download it. If you enjoy it and have a colleague or friend who could get value from its contents, then please share it with them.


Jeremy Campbell News , , , ,