Video-Virtual-ExperienceThere are some things that you just need to see or experience in order to fully appreciate them. Think about it for a moment…

  • Adrenaline sports and leisure – skydiving, car racing, BASE-jumping, amusement park rides like roller coasters, go carts, Segway tours, bicycle vacations, water skiing, snowboarding, jungle zip line rides, your hip hop speed Klezmer band…
  • New product demos – try to imagine what a Roomba did before you ever saw one in operation
  • Unusual talents – blowing up balloons with your ears, squirting milk from your eyeballs, rifle twirling, yodeling, bicycling backwards down mountain roads

There are some things that really need to be experienced in order to fully appreciated and understood. And, nothing captures an experience quite as effectively as a video.

And, depending upon what the experience is, it may be enough to simply show the thing you want others to experience, even in a simple way. For example, if you’ve created a new way to fold a t-shirt (there are lots of t-shirt folding videos on YouTube, by the way), you can probably capture the whole thing with your phone or another simple video camera. It doesn’t really need any production values and you don’t need a crew to produce it.

But, some experiences suffer from a lack of attention to detail and narrative, if they’re under-produced. In the world of fast-paced action – extreme sports and dynamic activities like those listed in the first bullet above – a depiction of those really suffer if they’re not giving the viewer a strong sense of movement, excitement, risk, and challenge. And, if there’s one tool that producers have in their quiver of toys that does more to create and capture those moments, it’s the GoPro camera.

Anyone can rush out and buy a GoPro – they’re about $400. You can buy ten of them and mount them all over your band’s (see above) drum kit, electric clarinet, accordion, and electric violin for a really fresh look at hip hop speed Klezmer.

However, you probably don’t have someone who can effectively edit your music video. You may not have a lighting director to make everyone look amazing from several angles, simultaneously. A lot of thinking and planning goes into the production of a music video. It’s not a casual undertaking.

If you have a new product – say a wet bar that also doubles as a tropical fish tank – you’re going to want a script and a storyboard to both show the product and offer your market a strong rationale for why they need to pick up the phone and order one.

  • Everyone will want to party in your basement!
  • Solo drinkers can pass the time by counting fish
  • Impress your boss
  • Those who pass out on the bar bring new meaning to the expression, “sleeping with the fishes.”

And, there is a broad range of techniques and effects the producer can bring to bear to make the experience more immersive…

  • Slow motion
  • Animation
  • Fast motion
  • Split screens
  • Graphic and text overlays on live video
  • Isolated elements through selective sharpening and blurring
  • Zooming into a shot to single something out
  • Titles and subtitles

The net result is that viewers really get to fully experience something in a way they’ve done before and if you can successfully gain their curiosity, you have the opportunity to land them as a customer, too.