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Ernie Mosteller is a video and film director who gets great performances from kids, adults, clowns, cinematographers, editors, animators, real people and the occasional frog.

An ex-interactive creative director and creative director, he understands traditional and new media — how they’re alike, and more importantly, how users use them differently.

He has directed hundreds of national and international commercials, and if pixels had any weight at all, a ton of web content. He has also created web and social media strategies for major brands. He writes and speaks extensively on the power of content in today’s media landscape.

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Quality Video: DIY (Cheap) or Else

Written on
Dec 1, 2008 
Author
Ernie Mosteller  |
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Quality Video: DIY (Cheap) or Else

branding_logos_small.jpgADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — So I bought a .44 magnum it was solid steel cast
And in the blessed name of Elvis well I just let it blast
‘Til my TV lay in pieces there at my feet
And they busted me for disturbin’ the almighty peace
Judge said “What you got in your defense son?”
“Fifty-seven channels and nothin’ on”
I can see by your eyes friend you’re just about gone
Fifty-seven channels and nothin’ on…
Fifty-seven channels and nothin’
- 57 Channels (And Nothin’ On), by Bruce Springsteen

In 1992, Springsteen lamented the slim pickings to be found in what was, at the time, a wealth of options on “satellite TV.” I wonder what the Boss thinks when he launches a browser these days.

We live in a world where simultaneously, everything’s on, and nothing’s on. The web has created the opportunity for anyone who can aim a lens with help from a flip-out monitor to produce and publish to a global audience. (Even if that global audience also happens to be a niche audience that’s labeled global, not by virtue of numbers, but by virtue of geographic distribution.) A boon to budding filmmakers, DIY-ers, and anyone with a teensy marketing budget, the near-zero delivery cost and similar production costs available to everyone who wants to play online have created seven bottomless seas of available content. And yet…

And yet, while we’ve passed the test when it comes to making it easy and cheap to make something on video for the web, I have to wonder if we’ve even begun to take the test that has to do with making it good.

Tastes change. Styles come and go. In clothes, in art, in film and video. Before MTV, narrative film was pretty much what there was. Early music videos chucked narrative in favor of montage, and introduced distressed, grainy, chopped-to-all-heck sequences that became the prevailing style for music video and commercial productions for a lot of years. Grungy, grainy, scratched-up film was cool, until it wasn’t.

Then better technology came along, allowing something that was closer to perfection. So, the quest for perfection began — producing extreme dynamic ranges; exquisite, perfect lighting, and lenses designed to hold unlimited depth of field. Perfection was king until your nephew picked up a camcorder, shot his buddy crashing a skateboard, and put it on YouTube. Then a different kind of grunge became everybody’s favorite flavor.

The DIY look has been with us for awhile now, fueled by the convergence of several factors: (1) A lot of stuff that looks like DIY is, in fact, DIY. (2) YouTube’s favorite compression renders even the biggest-budget blockbuster at DIY resolution, so it’s hard to tell the difference. (3) Success breeds imitation — so even if the piece in question is produced by an agency or production company, the cool thing to do is to make it look like it’s not. (4) Achieving a DIY look is cheap, fast, and easy, which goes a long way toward convincing a client it’s ok to do. (It goes so far toward doing that, in fact, that many clients are secretly — or not so secretly — wondering why they can’t just get their nephew to shoot their online video segments.) And finally, (5) traditional production companies and, well, agencies, are still having a hard time figuring out how to bring their knowledge and skills with moving images to a platform that simply doesn’t support the scale of financial returns they’re accustomed to.

I’m not one of those who believes production value equals content. For a huge efx feature, it might. But for most other things, content equals content. I do, however, believe that production value — and all the things that come with it, like skill with writing, direction, editorial and efx — contribute to the overall perception of a piece, by making it inherently more watchable. That lends credibility to the makers, and through them, to the brand being represented. At some point, you decide not to wear the torn jeans to the meeting, and at least put on a blazer. But even if you don’t subscribe to my theory of production-value’s value contribution, the chances are very real that tastes will, as they always have, change over time. We’ll go from grunge to slick, back to grunge, and back again. And we’re due for a taste change soon, by my calculation.

Production companies and agencies who are used to producing big dollar pieces for big dollar distribution channels have finally reached the point where they can no longer ignore the web. They have to figure out how to make a buck by producing stuff that plays online — and they will. And it’s a sure bet that they’re going to produce stuff that simply looks and plays better than what we’re accustomed to seeing now.

This is good news all around. Because it will allow brands to create video that’s more in keeping with the brand, potentially more attractive to a broader range of users, and still affordable enough to play in the free spaces. And it might get easier for you to explain to your client exactly why it’s a bad idea to give the production job to her nephew.

Tech advances, coupled with 2.0 usage and sharing patterns, have combined to create an atmosphere where many, many new sites that are being built for clients are essentially modular buckets. They’re designed to host a range of content — many times, video — that is to be created and updated ad infinitum. That content is going to be created by someone. If agencies and production companies can learn how to deliver cost-effective quality, they’ll get the gig. If not, the job goes to the nephew. Regardless of how it looks.





Reader Comments.

Great article, Ernie. And I hope you’re right… because we can’t compete with the nephew on price, but we can blow him away with creativity and ROI.

Posted by jlsimons | 1:42 pm on December 3, 2008.

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