Since the earliest days of television, video has been a powerful marketing medium. But due to its expense, production complexity, and professional scriptwriting requirements video has not always been every marketer’s first choice.
My guest this week argues that, due to lower costs, global distribution channels, and the presence of a high-quality video camera in every person’s pocket, we have entered The Video-First Era, and he has written a book of that same title to drive home his point.
Please join me and my guest, video marketing expert and author Patrick Frank, as we talk about what The Video-First Era of marketing means to you and your promotional efforts.
Learn more about Patrick: http://videofirstera.com/
Connect with Patrick on Twitter: @PatFrank
Resources Patrick shared:
Frank Felker 00:22
Thank you, Dude Walker. Yes, indeed. I am Frank Felker. Welcome back to Radio Free Enterprise.
My guest today is Patrick Frank. Patrick is an award-winning video producer and the author of the upcoming book, The Video-First Era. Patrick Frank, welcome to Radio Free Enterprise.
Patrick Frank 00:43
Frank, so glad to be here with you, neighbor.
Frank Felker 00:48
I wasn’t going to bring that up. But it’s kind of funny as people will see, or they can see right now. We both are named Frank. We both live in Alexandria, Virginia, and we both do video. Nonetheless, we’ve never met. Strange world living in these days.
Anyway, I’m glad to have you here Patrick. You’ve really got some great ideas, interesting ideas that I wanted to bring to my audience’s attention.
So I want to start a little framework here: you are a video producer, and you have for years, eight years or so, then producing corporate videos for a variety of clients. And I’ll let you speak to who those are in just a second. What sort of work… Pre-COVID? What did a day in the life of Patrick Frank and Patchbay Media look like?
Patrick Frank 01:36
Yeah, so I was a pretty traditional video production company. So being in the DC area, we do a lot of nonprofit work, some government clients and small businesses and really doing pretty traditional corporate video production, where we’d show up with some cameras and a small crew, we’d interview some people, we get some B roll or action shots, and we put it together and what we would call like a brand story package.
And that may include a homepage, video, a longer about the organization, video, and then maybe some shorter stuff for social media, something about a particular program or product or something like that. And we did a lot of that. And especially in the spring, we would do a ton of event work, we had a pretty cool way to cover events where we would go on site and interview people and cut together social videos and deliver it to the event. So they could post it throughout the events that have you know, having to wait afterwards. And then you know, you’re just having to pull from the stage and stuff like that. So we try to do things a little bit differently. And, but it was a lot of being on site, it was a lot of showing up filming interviews, spending money on equipment to keep up things like that.
Frank Felker 02:44
A lot of travel, a lot of onsite shooting that type of thing. You got your lights, camera, action, your sound guy, all the cables, world wires, I love that Patchbay Media name. And then lo and behold, along comes COVID. And just like virtually every business on Earth, your business kind of ran into a brick wall that it didn’t see coming, what how has the work you do and the videos you produce changed as a result of the pandemic?
Patrick Frank 03:18
Absolutely. So I will say that there were definitely some trends that were moving towards this direction. But like a lot of things COVID just accelerated it. So as we were working on these brand story videos, especially when we’re working for large associations, the comments that we gotten, the ideas we have are often like, Hey, we need to include our members, phones are good enough laptop, webcams are good enough. Let’s start incorporating some user generated content. Let’s have our members film some stuff talk about why they love being a part of this organization and talk about why they support why they donate why they volunteer, and start incorporating that into these like bigger budget, brands story video packages that we were doing.
So we were already seeing some of that, that we were tapping into those resources instead of having to fly everywhere and film everything with high quality. But then when it was literally illegal for me to film anything back in March in April of 2020. It really came down to like, okay, like how do we continue to make videos, and we really just relied on Zoom and some of these other tools. I’ll be honest, I never even noticed that there was a record button in a Zoom window. Until one day when I had this call about like, what the heck are we going to do with this video that we need to produce? And then I just kind of decide like, Well wait, what? Well, if we just do this on Zoom, and that first video we did the project that we were replaced with, again, traditional project.
We were going to go to a university in Maryland film with a couple professors, a couple students put together a video about a particular program that they were doing. But that program was a national program. And we just didn’t have it in the budget to fly around and interview all these professors around the country. So we interview them all on Zoom. And so instead of just having a handful of teachers and students from Maryland, we got to talk to people in Arizona and Minnesota and California. And just Was able, we were able to paint a more complete picture than we would have if we were limited to just the people in Maryland.
So it actually turned out being a better project. And I really just kind of run with this idea where, you know, maybe we don’t need cameras for a lot of different kinds of videos that people should be making.
Frank Felker 05:16
And you know, that’s an interesting sidetrack, which is, you and I as, quote, video professionals, were always interested in high resolution and great sound and lighting and framing and blahdy blahdy blahdy. But it turns out, you know, in the era of dash cam, pylon cam, closet, cam, you know, webcam, people, what people are willing to accept has really changed, and what constitutes, quote, production values has really changed. As a you know, I don’t know how much of a purist you are or used to be, do you find that more grading or more liberating?
Patrick Frank 05:56
Oh, 100%, more liberating. I think that along with Zoom fatigue, we also experienced a level of production fatigue, right? Like, we sort of had it in our mind that Oh, unless it was top notch production film with a $50,000 camera, then you know, it’s not worth watching or that messages is inferior or something like that. And I think that when you reduce everything down, and you have to use the tools that you have, instead of being able to bring in a professional crew, it really forces you to focus on the message, the story, the narrative. And so that’s what we’ve been able to do. As we’ve been interviewing people from all around the country and making these videos that incorporate lots of different voices, were able to create a better story. And that really is what drives me forward. And so you’re no longer using production as a crutch. Yeah, you’re just you’re focusing on the story.
Frank Felker 06:48
Well, and also, as you were just touching on it, democratizes it. And it allows more people to share their voice and their face, their whole heart and expressions and emotions. And it’s also forced those individuals out there who may have been camera shy and may still be camera shy, they had no choice but to stick their mug there and the lens and be seen. And I feel as though that has opened up a lot of minds, even out there in the general public relative to video communication. What’s your reaction to that statement?
Patrick Frank 07:22
Absolutely. I remember, instead of driving into a meeting, trying to get my clients and prospects on people like, Hey, can we just hop on a video chat? Can we just use Skype or Google meat or Google Hangouts? And I think that all these tools existed, but it really took the pandemic for us to wake up and say, you know, what, wait a second, we should be using all these tools. We don’t have to waste all this time commuting, we don’t have to fly across the country for one meeting anymore. And so I think you’re right, as people become more comfortable with this kind of understood some of the basics of like having your camera at eye level, being in front of a window instead of behind a window, things like that. And just getting reps and getting practice. It’s definitely opened up a lot of opportunities.
And I think a lot of companies have seen to that. We don’t have to rely on Zoom, we can build our own specific video solutions for our specific products and services. And so I think that that is really one of the key points of my book is kind of looking at what are those Zoom 2.0 products and services that people are going to be using every day.
Frank Felker 08:23
That’s great. I really want to build on that. But I want to sort of pivot from Zoom to get a little deeper into this. You use the expression just a moment ago, Zoom fatigue. But you feel that there’s a different way for us to look at Zoom. You compare to Napster, as I had to hear, oh, a haphazard introduction to an entirely new era. What do you mean by that?
Patrick Frank 08:52
Yeah, absolutely. So Napster started in the late 90s in college dorms because they had the highest the fastest internet.
Frank Felker 08:59
Would you explain what Napster was?
Patrick Frank 09:01
Sure. Napster was the first internet music solution. So songs were traded back and forth on a peer-to-peer network. So if I had a song, I could upload it to the Napster platform, and someone else could download that song from me. And so you can imagine, with computers and internet limitations, and things like that, that just wasn’t possible until a certain point in time.
And the analogy I like to make here with video is that once people had a taste of this, of being able to download any song they wanted whenever they wanted for free, it’s really hard to go back to the old way of driving the best by paying $18 for a CD when you only want one song, right? And so I think that that’s where we are right now in Zoom in this video world is that Zoom is great. The technology is really impressive. It works well. It’s reliable, but it it’s not the best. It’s not optimized for all these different things that we’re using it for.
And So as we mature in this remote first world, and with our teams increasingly remote like, I really don’t think that offices in the way that we remember them, I think offices are going to go away for the most part, when companies can hire anyone in the world instead of someone in happens to live within a 20-mile radius, it really opens up a lot of possibilities for companies as well. So really, what am I, I’m trying to introduce new tools and strategies so that people can make use of video with their remote teams or remote communication.
Frank Felker 10:33
That’s great stuff, Patrick, I really think that was well put. And, you know, Napster was the beginning. And iTunes, you know, might not have been the end, but it sure was something else. And probably, so no one could have ever believed what’s going to happen, the iPod and the iTunes and 1000 songs in your pocket and downloading any song you want by itself for 99 cents and all the things that came forward. from that original idea. I really love the analogy that you made there. Now you follow on to say, quote, it’s only going to get better from here. So how could it get any better than Zoom? Patrick?
Patrick Frank 11:13
Well, like I said, Zoom is very easy to use, and everyone is familiar with it. But it’s not great for things like interacting, right? Zoom has polls, that’s about it. How can we make things more interactive, if you’re working in a classroom, and you want to have small groups, and you want to be able to share within those groups and you’re a teacher? One example I talked about in the book is this right? So let’s say you’re a computer science teacher, you have 50 kids in your class, and you want to be able to put them in small groups, and you want to be able to walk around and talk to each one of those groups. Well, how would you do that? Oh, and then in the middle of it, there’s something that you want to announce to everybody.
Zoom is not really built for this. So there’s this really great platform called Gather, Gather got gathered dot town is URL, you go check it out, you create anime, Pokémon, Zelda, at style video game version of yourself, and then you’re able to walk around in this pixelated world. So what the teacher does is he says, All right, everybody, literally just with your keyboard walk to different parts of the room. And he with his avatar walks around, does small group conversations, and if there’s anything that you’d like to address, the whole, the whole class, you just hit the spotlight button, quickly shares with everybody then goes back to the small groups. So I think that there’s a whole spatial layer, that Zoom is missing, that I think is really interesting. And it’s going to have a lot of great use cases in the next few years.
Frank Felker 12:28
You talk about something on your Indiegogo page about sending a meet sending a video, instead of attending a meeting. What do you mean by that?
Patrick Frank 12:40
Yeah, I love this. And so for my personal usage. There, I have really just how many times have you done an email where you said, See my responses in bold, see my responses in blue, I see my responses in red, right. And it’s just like, it’s completely unwieldy, right. So what I do is I just go to loom calm. And that’s a really great free app that allows you to do a quick video and screen share. And so I will literally just recite my reply to the email, it creates a transcript, someone can watch it at 2x speed, and allows me to get my ideas out faster, instead of like those crazy threaded responses or writing a really long email. And a lot of times too, it allows me to do is I’ll start recording a video using loom. And I realized, like, Ah, this kind of sucks, stop, start over again, get a new train of thought.
And then the second time, my second take is much more focused, it’s much more concise and tight. And then I’ll just send that video off. A lot of times, it’s a minute and a half long. So it’s not too much for someone to ask them to watch that. And I think for a lot of the things that we do meetings for updates, for looking for feedback for doing things like that, pretty much anything other than brainstorming, you could just do in a video. And then there’s a new platform called supranormal that allows threaded video conversations so I could send you a video and then you could send me a video reply back and we can have this whole conversation all in one place. And it doesn’t matter that we’re not talking in real time. So asynchronous video communications is one of the things that I think is going to be a huge unlock, especially for remote teams that have employees or contractors all over the world.
Frank Felker 14:13
Super normal. I love that. Great.
14:17
Yeah,
Frank Felker 14:17
I’m not just normal. Yeah, the one we talked about gathering town was at the classroom one
Patrick Frank 14:27
yeah, gather dot town. Gather them. That is Yeah, gathered. Yeah,
Frank Felker 14:32
it’s going to try to get all of us into the show notes so that people don’t have to find them.
14:38
Yeah,
Frank Felker 14:38
I noticed that something also in your Indiegogo video that I recognized and correct me if I’m wrong. But you talked about it. All you said in your script was creating video presentations that people actually want to watch. And it looks like you were using this new video capability from Pres. For that, am I right about that?
Patrick Frank 15:02
You’re right. Yeah, presto, have
Frank Felker 15:03
you been working with that? What’s your experience with it? Yeah,
Patrick Frank 15:07
I met with the Prezi. Team, I had a couple demos with them, I talked to some of their content specialists and Prezi is, it’s been around for a long time. It’s kind of a PowerPoint competitor that a lot of nonprofits use. So I had had some familiarity with it from the clients I was working with. Basically, they were a less expensive version than Microsoft Office. For a lot of these scrappy teams and nonprofits, this was a really great solution. And so they took the idea of PowerPoint and how they did that a little bit differently and created this Prezi video product.
And what Prezi video allows you to do is it allows you to be like your own Weekend Update anchor, where you have graphics that are over your shoulder that you don’t have to decide whether you want your camera to be full screen or your slides to be full screen. It’s all together. It’s all embedded in. So it’s really an intuitive way as we’re doing more virtual presentations, as we’re doing more keynote talks and things like that from home. It’s a much more engaging format, where allows you to have some graphics and supplemental content, but also be able to have your face full screen as well. So it’s just much more native delivery.
Frank Felker 16:18
It’s really cool. And, you know, unfortunately, I don’t have any B roll to roll in here and show people what it looks like. But I do recommend, it’s prezi.com przi.com. Is that right?
Patrick Frank 16:30
Yeah, prezi.com slash video.
Frank Felker 16:33
And this is one of these times where I get to ask the question that I want to know, which is I saw that and I thought, wow, this is really cool. I really like that. What sort of a learning curve is associated with that I remember with the original Prezi, like Zooming in and doing 3d stuff. And it just I just, I didn’t feel like I had the time to learn how Yes, how about this Prezi video? How hard is that to learn? Yeah,
16:57
yeah, it’s
Patrick Frank 16:58
not very hard to learn, I think they have a lot of really great templates. But I will say that it is kind of dense. I think Prezi video is definitely more academic focused. And I think it’s definitely for people that have a lot of information. So those text heavy slides and things like that, where you would have a lot of information on screen Prezi video is going to be great for that something a little simpler that I really like as well, that’s also that virtual camera Weekend Update, if you will, kind of approach is called Hmm, so that’s Mm hmm. app. And that’s a little bit more streamlined, a little simpler to use. And it’s a little more fun. It comes with a lot of backgrounds that they call rooms that are very customizable, and very colorful. So I would say Prezi is great for more dense topics. More academic, you need a lot of information, and is great for more fun, simpler, you can throw together a presentation in there really quickly.
Frank Felker 17:49
Now, it’s that app, will it run on Windows or Mac? Or is it only mobile?
Patrick Frank 17:55
I think it’s both. It’s not more, it’s definitely not mobile, I use it on a Mac, I think it’s windows also, what you should definitely check both of those out and kind of see which one works best for you.
Frank Felker 18:04
Great. I want to back up for one second, because perhaps somebody listening right now is thinking oh, well, you know, this is all a bunch of fancy stuff. And you know, I don’t have the budget, it’s not going to work for me, etc. Could you give us sort of an broad brushstrokes, an idea of the clients that you work with? And what sort of organizations you think these ideas will work for?
18:31
Sure,
Patrick Frank 18:32
I think the ideas here work for any organization that has remote teams that are looking to communicate more effectively. So I think the first thing to do is say, what meetings Do I have that can be canceled, where I can just send a video, again, an update, if it’s, if it’s feedback, you’re looking for something like that, see if there’s ways that you can just send a video to get your point across, it’s going to be a lot more personal. And you can definitely display a lot more enthusiasm than you would in in just an email or a quick thing on slack or text or something like that. But it saves you that 30-minute meeting.
So I think that that’s one thing to do as well. And then for larger organizations where you’re doing more presentations, whether that’s presenting a webinar on all staff meeting, things like that, that’s when I would start to experiment with the Prezi videos and to make your presentations a little bit more engaging, to make them a little bit more fun, make it a little more memorable, as opposed to just relying on PowerPoint slides or something like that. So I think that those are two places where I would start for using some of these ideas.
Frank Felker 19:36
Great. Thank you for that. You also did a quick demo within your video of editing video by editing text. What? What platform is that that you were using?
Patrick Frank 19:49
Yeah, definitely. So that’s one of my it’s literally the most used tool that I use right now. When I’m making videos for clients. It’s called D scripts d s, CR IPT and D scripts. lets you edit videos by editing text. So it creates an you drop in your video and it creates an auto transcription of the video. And when you want to make edits to it, you literally just delete words, just like a Google Doc. And it has a lot of other nifty tricks to where it’ll determine all of your, what they call filler words. So your ns yazz. SOS, you knows, and you can delete those as well. And, yeah, it’s really incredible. And so when we’re working on videos, especially with our edit video calls, comm service, we’re taking these Zoom conversations, dropping it into descript, finding the most shareable moment, editing up that transcript because we want to make sure that those captions end up in that video. And it’s just a completely essential part of our workflow now.
Frank Felker 20:44
Now, that D script was founded by a guy, Andrew trying to think who he is, let’s say he’s out of Chicago, and he was the founder of a big.com. Who was that guy?
Patrick Frank 20:55
Yeah. It’s Andrew Mason from Groupon.
Frank Felker 20:57
Groupon, that’s it? Of course. Yeah. Okay. I had a couple of emails with him. Whatever descript first came out. But in the early versions, again, I was just like, I’m not sure. This is something I’m going to use. And it probably didn’t have the functionality than that it does today. But I thought I was familiar with that.
Patrick Frank 21:17
Yeah, so it really started off as for podcasting for audio, okay. Yeah, right video features, really last year, they added a ton of video functionality, their discord is great. So if you ever need any help, Andrew himself is very active in there answering questions and giving feedback and things like that. So I absolutely love their product and their community.
Frank Felker 21:36
That’s great. I definitely need to check it out. Again, I think he reached out to me because I was a podcaster. And, you know, he asked me, he just said, Here, try this and tell me what you think, which is a great way to go. And I told him, I can’t figure it out how to use it. And I’m too busy to really dig into it. So thanks, Andrew. But anyway, so I’m glad, I’m glad to hear it’s progressed. Now you also talk about things like big virtual presentations and like virtual trade shows and conferences. What can you tell us about that?
Patrick Frank 22:08
Yeah, definitely. So if you think back to what I was talking about, with that gathered town platform where you’re able to physically move around, and you choose an avatar and things like that, if I had filmed a lot of academic conferences, right, I had a whole ongoing gig where I would fly around to medical conferences and film interviews of doctors and one of the kind of Hallmark events that happen, there is the poster session, right? So all these researchers that publish papers, they show up in this room, and they literally have a poster next to them. And people come by and talk about their research and their findings.
So how would you do a poster session in Zoom, I know you could go round robin, you could like everyone would have their own Zoom Room like it would be really, really difficult. And so but in gather or a platform that has any kind of spatial component allows you to walk around, it’s very natural, you just walk into the poster room, you walk over to the author who’s their avatar is standing right next to their poster, you can press a couple buttons to interact with that poster, that poster itself can be interactive. Now you can have a video on it, you can have other kinds of rich media instead of just charts and graphs and text.
And so and it also offers a lot of serendipity too. So when I interviewed the gathered team, for my book, they told me a story about how there was someone who was attending this poster session, they walked up to a paper that they’re interested in, and who was there talking to the author, their former college professor, right. So they had no idea they were going to be there. So as we talked about trying to put some of the serendipity back into these, these experiences that we used to do in person. Again, I think adding the spatial component to this in a way that Zoom doesn’t allow is really interesting, neat stuff.
Frank Felker 23:47
And, you know, I agree with you completely, that COVID accelerated. So many trends that were already in motion work from home, video communication, that kind of thing. But I can tell you, as personally, as an early adopter of technology throughout my career, that if people don’t see the value in something, they’re not going to try it. It’s human nature to stick with the tried and true, not rock the boat. I actually I was in the printing business and first started receiving print jobs online in around 1987, or 88. But it wasn’t until seven years later that I got a second customer to try it. It’s too long of a story to go into why the first guy saw the value.
But if people don’t see the value, they won’t change. Now you put a gun to their head and force them to do it. And they got no other choice, then well, all at once, “Let’s take a look at this.” And so I’m very excited about all that. But still in all people need to embrace it and they have to accept it and they have to learn things and do things. So it’s comes back to the value proposition that will help convince them to do that. Let’s talk about this. Let’s say for an article When you’re a solopreneur, mom and pop shop, Main Street business, maybe up to 10 employees or something, where’s the value? Why should they engage with this, Patrick?
Patrick Frank 25:14
So I mean, if we’re thinking about small businesses, again, when we think about how you’re going to grow your business, a lot of small teams are hiring overseas, right? They’re using platforms like Upwork, and Fiverr. And as they’re being able to delegate some of their tasks, whether that be marketing, customer service, sales, things like that, it makes sense financially, to hire these people that work in other countries. And so the question is, how do we get them on the same page and build company culture with this remote landscape, and I think there’s a couple different ways you can do it. So the first thing you could do is you can, once you once you reach a certain point in your business, you can start doing remote on sites.
So now instead of leaving the office to go on some kind of retreat, or something like that, you may come together once, twice, four times a year, fly in everybody, and now your office budget turns into your retreat your remote, onsite budget, so you can get everybody together for that week or so where you can have all of those personal conversations, get to know your team members better. And then as you fly back out, you know, you’ve built your culture that way, and it doesn’t require rent or leases or anything like that. So I think that’s one way that we can do it.
Frank Felker 26:30
That’s great. I hadn’t even considered that. From like an HR management team building standpoint. You also mentioned that people like public speakers, authors, coaches, and consultants can benefit from this, what’s a quick tip that you would give to those sorts of people like professional experts?
Patrick Frank 26:51
Absolutely. So if you’re a coach, and you are onboarding a new client, chances are you’re saying the same stuff over and over and over again, right. And so what I encourage people to do is record that once and turn that into an onboarding video series, three or five videos that you could drip out over the course of a week or sell a couple of minutes long each. So when you have a new client that signs up with you, you say, hey, do me a favor, watch this onboarding series thing, this is going to answer a lot of questions about my program and how it works, then once you’re done watching it, we’re going to hop on a really focused, customized 20- or 30-minute call questions and make it all about you.
And so I think that that’s one way that we can start using this as well, if this was if for some reason, you know, back in the pre COVID times you would meet face to face with every person, you’d have no way to be able to film this and turn this into an asset that you can deploy. And obviously like that onboarding, series, two, could be some kind of lead magnet could live on your website somewhere, it could be social media content. So I think if you think about repurposing these conversations, that’s one way you can get started with a video first mindset.
Frank Felker 27:55
And another thing I like about that is potentially pre-COVID, people would have taken offense to having this generic onboarding video, you know, hey, I’m paying this guy a lot of money to be my coach. And but now it’s just like, Oh, that makes sense. And, and so he really does match your time investment with the value that you’re delivering kind of thing. Okay, I was going to open with this question. But I we’re very near to being out of time. And so I’m going to ask this is one of my closing questions, which is, what exactly do you mean by the video first era? How do we put video first, what does it mean?
Patrick Frank 28:37
Definitely. So at some point, it’s going to be safe to get together, we’re not going to have any restrictions, we’re going to have herd immunity or some level of normalcy, we’ll return. But I think that my point with the title and with the book is that there’s a lot of reasons to continue working this way. We’ve talked about a lot of them in this conversation. But ultimately, there’s going to be times when we’re going to want to get together, right. And I think if we look at events, for example, I think the new norm is going to be let’s say you had 1000-person event previously, in pre COVID times.
I think in the future, that video is going to have instead of 1000 people in person, maybe 100, maybe 100, or 200, but then they may have 10,000, that are watching remotely in a hybrid event kind of format. So when I say video first, the idea is that the people that need to be there will be there, those are the investors, those are the VIPs, that sort of thing. They’re going to have a more intimate experience. And it makes sense for them to be there in person. But for a lot of other people, it doesn’t make sense to be there in person, the travel cost isn’t necessary. The time away from work isn’t necessary from your family from all these other things.
And we just need to be able to deliver that access so that more people can participate. And ultimately, it’s better for sponsors. It’s better for hosts it’s better for everybody. So I think that that’s really kind of the message there is that that obviously I’m not saying never get together in person, but I think that it’s going to the the bar is has have been raised for when it does make sense to be in person because we do realize just how much we can do in a remote setting.
Frank Felker 30:08
I have to ask a follow-on question, because as you were speaking, I was reminded, you know, 1000 years ago, I was hired to produce a video of a live presentation being pulled on by a real estate expert, that he was about 300 people, I’d say, and we had multi cameras. And we’ll go into all the technology of it. But in any event, what I noticed it was the first time I’d ever done anything like that was that the presence of the video crew and equipment, impinged on the live event that people like had to stand up and go to a microphone to ask a question. Whereas if it weren’t for that, they would have just shouted it out, or what have you, there was 10, plus people a little guilty about seeing being seen.
In any event, what I realized was that there was like a scale, the more we lean towards a great video production, the more it impacted the live experience of the people in the audience negatively. And vice versa, the more we tried to accommodate the live audience, the less quality video we could capture. So I’m not putting words in your mouth, I’m asking you, are you saying that maybe we should lean towards the video experience, even if it does come at the expense, a little bit of a live audience?
Patrick Frank 31:24
Yeah, that’s a really good observation. And I can share a quick story about that as well. For the last several years, I’ve been working on this program called speak with confidence. We work with coaches, and entrepreneurs, authors, people like that. And we help them essentially right Ted style talks. So 10-to-15-minute talks. And then we get them all together, we rent a stage and we have a camera crew there. And they deliver that talk on a stage and we can deliver them a demo video and a homepage video for their website and things like that. That’s this whole this whole thing started. Yeah, it’s really cool. This whole thing started because people kept asking me, how do I get a demo video, and I would go with them to film at whatever the thing that they were speaking out, but like, like you said, it’s not meant for a film crew, right? The lighting is terrible. You know, there’s no artist stand. It’s it just like wasn’t optimized. So we realized, like, Okay, if we’re going to do this, right, we have to literally rent a theater and, and fill our own audience and kind of, you know, redo takes if we need and things like that. So I totally get where you’re coming from. And I think that, that that makes a lot of sense.
So to answer your question, I think that this is one of the opportunities with these next generation platforms hype, the hybrid model is going to be here to stay. So how can we make sure that people that are in person can interact with people that are watching it remotely? How do these platforms need to interact? If you have a combination of stage speakers and virtual speakers? How is that going to work? There’s also an idea to that, you know, when you’re watching a talk, and I’m sitting next to you, we have a shared experience there. And right now, we don’t have that kind of shared experience when everyone is just at home on their computers. So I think there’s a lot to figure out. And that’s what I’m really excited about over there.
Frank Felker 33:05
That’s great. Well, yeah. If you’re not stretching yourself, you’re not learning anything new. That’s great. Patrick, I’m sure a lot of people who are listening or watching are curious to know how they could connect with you learn more about your services, learn more about your book, what’s the best way for somebody to reach out to you? Sure,
Patrick Frank 33:26
I think probably the best way is on Twitter. I’m at Pat, Frank, pretty easy. You can also find me on LinkedIn. That’s it. Yeah. And you can check out the book at video first era.com.
Frank Felker 33:39
Okay, great. Now, there’s one last question that I always like to ask, before we sign off, which is, we’ve covered a lot of ground. But is there a question that I haven’t asked you? Or something that’s come to your mind as we’ve been talking that you’d like to share before we sign off?
Patrick Frank 33:59
Well, I can ask you what, what kind of virtual events have you attended? And have you done any speaking and what are some of the issues or hang ups or reservations that you’ve had, as you’ve been participating in this video? First world?
Frank Felker 34:12
Are you asking me or the audience? No, I’m asking you. Yeah, God. Okay. Well, as you can see, I do quite a bit of remote video conversation giving or doing. I in the past, I haven’t done much of a remote meeting, I was trying to join up or become a regular member with a networking group that meets weekly. And I will tell you that I found it to be a little bit drawn out. I definitely got the Zoom fatigue. There’s no question about that. And so I felt as though there were a number of things, that small number of things that can be changed with the format, including shortening it, that would make it more engaging for me, but I was new to the group and I didn’t feel like it was my place to try offer the suggestions. Um, you know, I have been using remote video for years, it’s kind of like reminds me very much of like exceed receiving the print jobs online.
But very few people felt comfortable with it. And so for me, the benefit of COVID has been that it’s like everybody’s doing this now video conferencing and video interviewing. And so it makes it easier for me to connect with quality guests, even if they don’t have your level of experience with video, more of the common person has a pretty decent AV setup, microphone camera and that kind of thing. So I would say overall, I’m excited about what’s going on now. And, and I’m very excited about a lot of stuff that you’ve shared, man. And I’m glad that you and I have gotten to know each other. And here we are neighbors. So now we’re going to have to have a beer.
Patrick Frank 35:50
That’s right, let’s do it. We’ll go to Old Town or something. It’d be great.
Frank Felker 35:54
Great. Okay, so that’s it, you don’t have any last pearls of wisdom that you’re going to share with us. Now,
36:01
I think,
Patrick Frank 36:02
I think like what we talked about, I feel like most people are more comfortable on camera, and I think that everyone should take it a step further. So just a couple things you could do. Instead of sending an email, send a video go set up an account on loom Comm. Give it a try. It’s really easy to capture your camera, capture your screen, and just get your thoughts out, you know, what can you do? That can be sent in a video that can replace a meeting, I challenge everyone to cancel a meeting and send a video instead, and just see what happens. So I think that that that’s a good place to start.
Frank Felker 36:34
Awesome. Well, Patrick Frank, thank you so much for joining me today on Radio Free Enterprise.
Patrick Frank 36:41
Thanks for having me, Frank.
Frank Felker 36:42
Thanks again to Patrick. And thank you for joining us. Until next time, I’m Frank Felker saying, I’ll see you on the radio.
Dude Walker 36:52
Forgiving your entrepreneurial sins with a gentle wave of his microphone, here’s Frank Felker.
