Raising The Bar

This is a camera….

This morning we are kicking off a New York Travel Channel Academy.

This is, in fact, academy number 145.

And the demand is as strong as ever – stronger in fact, than when we started with 001 in Miami.

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, we ran at 2-day intensive course at the City University of NY Graduate School of Journalism.  We were joined by a group of journalists from Youngstown, Ohio, who are working in partnership with the local newspaper there.

Video is ubiquitious.

And so is the demand for video of all kinds.

But no matter how much video is produced, the bottom line always is that the product must be perfect.

Perfect.

The average American spends 4.5 hours a day watching TV.

And another 4 hours or so watching screens, computers and now phones, and a great deal of that is video as well.

So the demand for video is very high, but so is the expectation of excellence.

We’re a video nation, and as a result, we all know what video is supposed to look like.

This makes part of the training easier, but it also makes the demands for the final product much higher.

People who have seen James Cameron’s Titanic or watch Law and Order on NBC are not prepared to tolerate bad video.

You can’t put a piece of crap on the air or on line and run a font underneath that says “I know this thing sucks, but hey, I made it myself and it was cheap.”

Frankly, no one cares what it cost to make (except the person who hired you). For the viewer this is absolutely immaterial.

The explosion of demand for video and the concurrent fractionalization of audience and revenue is driving an interesting dichotomy:  the demand for the volume of new video production is way up, the amount that most people will pay for video is continually being driven down.  But the expectation for the quality of the product remains very very high.

That’s why we tell the people in our bootcamps that we demand only one thing:  perfection.

Fortunately, perfection (or at least getting close) is increasingly easier because the technology keeps getting better.  Cameras are very very good and edit software gets better and easier and cheaper all the time.

The defining trait of perfect is not just the shooting and the cutting, but also the story telling.

In fact, that may, in the end, prove the most important part.

And that’s why we spend so much time on the storytelling part of the training.

The days of just showing up and pointing the camera at an event, or a building, are over.

If you’re going to Paris, The Travel Channel is not going to pay your for exterior shots of the Eiffel Tower.

But they will pay you for a nice little story about a charcuterie in the 8th that no one has ever heard of until now.

We find that the greatest differentiator between those who are successful at this, and those who are not is, ironically, discipline.

Discipline is not generally thought of as a trait of filmmakers or journalists.

They tend toward the scruffy.

But we find over the years, that the more disciplined your approach, the better your product will be.