This week in London
Last week, as you know, we were in Geneva training the UNHRC to shoot and edit their own video.
This week, we’re in London running the Guardian Media Academy, a partnership with The Guardian, the best newspaper in the world (IMHO).
The lessons we’re teaching at the Guardian Academy will be pretty familiar to everyone on nyvs.com.
Today we started with ‘cutting the carrots’.
What’s interesting is the kind of people who are signing up for the Guardian Academy.
Our original idea was to offer this as a professional course for European journalists.
There are some of those, but there are also people from all walks of life and with all kinds of interests, from the digital director of a travel website to a spinal neurosurgeon who wants to videotape his operations for instructional purposes to a professor of communications from the US and many others.
When we started doing these kinds of face-to-face trainings in 1988 the only people we dealt with were broadcast journalists from TV networks.
Who else would even think of picking up a video camera.
Now, everyone is doing video
Newspapers
Magazines
Websites
Spinal Surgeons
And just about everyone else.
The bottom line for any video is that the product must be perfect.
People are conditioned to watching perfect video. They see movies. They watch hour after hour of TV a day. They see tons of videos online.
If you are going to put a video up for public consumption, whether its for a newspaper or your own website, the video must be perfect as well.
Perfect.
Precision.
Imagine if you were a surgeon and you put messy video online. What does that tell your patients?
Same goes for any other business.
Have a roof repair business? Will IÂ trust you to fix my roof if you can’t even create professional video?
What does that tell me about the quality of your work.
That’s why we always say, we demand only one thing: perfection.
