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Thursday, June 17, 2010

Professional Production

Posted by Patricia Zimmermann at 9:19AM | 3 comments

Blog written by Ann Michel and Phil Wilde, principals, Insights International

What do you need to know in order to produce a program?

In production, when working for a paying client, you don’t actually start with nothing.

You have been hired for a reason.

The client has something to say, something that they need your skills for, to turn nothing into something that an audience will hear.

Once you know what their purpose is, what they want, why they have hired you, AND, who the audience is, the rest can be pretty straightforward. The style of the production, and the length, derives from knowing the purpose of the show and who the audience is.

If, for example, your purpose is to make a trailer to convince high school students to apply to Ithaca College, you know you will make the show short, and fast paced.

If your purpose is to hire famous professors to Ithaca College, the show could be longer, and have a more stately pace, with interviews from other scholars, and adults like the ones in your audience.

So it worth exploring these "why" and "for whom:" questions as you embark on a production.

For the FLEFF competitions, we want to explore, provoke, inspire. That is our purpose.

Our audiences include filmmakers, environmentalists, thinkers.

Tags: audience, environmental media, filmmaking tips, professional production, video tips

3 Comments

2:14 a.m. on June 19, 2010 Peter Srinivasan said,

"So it worth exploring these "why" and "for whom:" questions as you embark on a production."

Not only worth it, but necessary. Whether the audience is a traditional "market share" or whether the CREATOR is the audience. It is the "why" that defines a project; it is the audience that shapes a project.

3:54 p.m. on October 8, 2010 Justin Taggett said,

I agree with Peter in a lot of ways. It really is the audience that shapes the project. You know who you are directing this towards and so all your decisions are based on that. You have to decide what pace you need to have, what style of editing you will use, and what type of music you will use. Do you agree that all these things shape the final outcome of the project?

10:44 p.m. on December 12, 2010 Kevin Campbell said,

Yea it is worth exploring "why and "for whom". Your trying to get a message across to a specific target audience then you have to know the variables that will sell to them more. In these productions there are so many choices and variables. That is why it is critical that you understand what you want to show and how your going to do it. If you don't do these things you'll make a generic video that disappears in the noise of everything else.

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