WebVideo

High Definition Web Video: Concept to Completion

Let me show you how to save advertising dollars and increase online sales through the phenomenal power of web video.  Put the skills of a 10-year veteran TV news content producer to work for you.  Tight production schedule experience means you can get what you need, when you need it.  I can help you brainstorm your next project, focus it, script it, film it, produce it and painlessly put it on your website.  Call or text me at 205-370-2997

Recent Work:

“Summer Youth Chess 2010” is a short piece I made in June 2010 to promote a local, free weekend chess event for young people in our area, hosted at a nearby book store. It is the first video I made shooting full frame HD (1920 x 1080p) on my new Canon Rebel T2i DSLR camera, shot with a 50mm f/1.8 lens, a tripod and a flash brace; it was edited in Final Cut Pro with graphics made in Apple Motion.

“Autumn Memories” is a short film I made in November 2009 at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. I tried to capture the fall colors, as well as experimenting with my Sony Z5U camcorder’s shallow Depth of Field capability. This post showcases YouTube’s new full HD 1080p player, which drastically upgrades its position in the category of free web video hosting solutions:

Non-Profit Organization uses Web Videos to talk about Health Care:

Canadian Health Care Series for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy — I traveled 7,000 miles round-trip from Birmingham to Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and finally to Newfoundland, interviewing Canadians about their universal health care system in a single week. I spent about a week and a half editing six mini-documentary style pieces, which so far have a total of more than 25,000 hits:

The Future of Broadcasting

After you’ve taken a look at some of the web videos on this page, scroll back up and click on the following link for an interesting series of articles at the Adobe website about the future of broadcasting, content delivery, and the ways people will use video on the internet and on mobile devices:

http://www.adobe.com/solutions/broadcast/

Web Video Business Features

Here are some examples of feature stories related to specific businesses created for news broadcasts. Each of the features on this page was conceived, shot, written, edited and produced by John Marc Green as the normal output of a single news day, usually representing 4 to 5 hours of actual videography and production work.

Bama Video Game Champ

The manager of a modern arcade draws many people to his business by being the “unbeatable” video game champion of head-to-head fighting games. He recently won a trip to a major international competition for video games in Japan.

Gas Busting Scooters

One day when we were trying to figure out how to tell the same “high gas prices” story for the hundredth time, someone brought up the new scooter craze. I found a unique shop in downtown Birmingham that has a personality all its own, an expression of the owner’s passion for the machines.

Birmingham HBOT

A remarkable group of parents and doctors have combined their resources to offer a variety of therapies for children with Autism and related syndromes. The key treatment is Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy, in which doctors “dive” with children in pressurized tanks which help force pure oxygen into their bloodstream to assist the body in healing itself.

Bye-Bye Starbucks

Two independent coffee shops weathered the storm of nearby Starbucks locations, and have recently learned those locations will soon close due to economic pressure on the coffee giant.

Four-Day Work Week

Businesses like the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce are taking steps to help employees struggling under high gas prices with innovative new approaches like a four-day work week of 10-hour days.

Designing Websites People Can Find

If you have a business website, you have the internet equivalent of your own newspaper, radio, and television station rolled into one. All you need are viewers, who may eventually become regulars and customers. The process of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a method of making your website more interesting and valuable through specific ways of writing the invisible web computer code that governs how the search engines see your website. These techniques of coding, tagging, and interlinking within the site and outside of it, as well as the quality of your content, can increase the likelihood your site will be found by people interested in what you have to say or sell.

Web design companies that create websites with SEO in mind can turn your website from an electronic business card into a popular destination, provided your content is useful and people share it with their friends. Isotope 11 is my personal choice for website design and construction because in addition to excellent, clean, original graphic design, their content-management sites are built with SEO as the driving principle. There’s no point in investing in a website nobody can find. Thankfully, SEO can dramatically increase the visibility of your website in the online communities you want to reach.

I recently discovered a very good book on the subject, Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walter. It talks about the concept of “findability” as well as discussing standards for code and content. This is a great book for web designers, bloggers, and anyone, especially a business owner, who creates content for their own website. Some of the more technical sections may be a little advanced for anyone who does not actually work with web code, but there is plenty of big-picture strategy and advice for those who use internet websites to communicate.

Quality content is one of the most important components of SEO. That content is usually print or photographic. Video content is especially powerful because it can be cross-linked and shared among a variety of video websites as well as on your own website. Since the content of the video is completely up to the creators, there is an almost unlimited potential for creating quality content with video that will not only benefit you as a business owner directly through increased sales, but also indirectly it will add value to your website and thus increase its SEO rating, making it even more visible to people you never imagined would find it.

The core idea behind Green Media Production is that original, quality content has intrinsic value, and that short-form video programming is a preferable format for people who prefer the internet for information, entertainment, and socializing. My goal is to bring the kind of quality programming that attracts viewers to television news broadcasts to business websites, so that your website you can become an independent programming destination for web users, not just an electronic business card.

Musical Farmers Market

A church in East Lake hosts a farmers market each Saturday in its parking lot, bringing growers and consumers together, and giving community gardeners a place to sell what they produce.

Imagine the Possibilities…

With web video there really are no limits to content creation and distribution. While a high-speed internet connection is a plus, it is not necessary when it comes to video that can be compressed and downloaded for viewing on a mobile phone or music device.

Video makes the internet a friendly experience for people who are used to viewing television, especially people like me who wear glasses and do not enjoy reading long passages of text on a computer screen. With a well-made web video, you can invite people to go on a nice virtual tour of your location, meet your staff, or get their most frequently asked questions answered by a real person. They can use the money they save on the gas they would have spent driving to your location to purchase something from your online store or maybe over the phone.

But web video can be much more. Suppose you wanted to share a recipe a week from your grandmother’s secret cookbook, and you have a video showing how to make those mouth-watering apple fritters she used to make, and invite people who see the video to come by your place for a sample and a look around. Now suppose you made the weekly 3-minute-or-so episodes available on the web for viewing or downloading to a mobile device, so folks could share it with friends. It’s really easy to add a video introduction and a closing page with your website information and phone number to such a production. This is the kind of real content that will add value to your website, but also it will add much more to the experience of interacting and doing business with you.

We live in such a fast-paced, high-tech, isolated culture these days. Using web video to create that human connection that is so lacking in the world could be the thing that sets you and your business apart, and helps you make not just new customers, but new friends.