Video Highlights From An Excellent 2011

Posted on December 29, 2011 by Nikc Miller

We had a fantastic year at Render Perfect Productions. Between our big move to Towson, launching our new website and rebranding, receiving a copious amount of Telly and Communicator awards, and creating great videos & web design projects for our wonderful clients; we had a great time bringing the most powerful web marketing and video production to our clients.

With ever-continuing advances in the world of web design and video production, we plan on making 2012 an even bigger and better year for us and our clients.

Here are two video highlights from 2011:

One of our favorite video projects to come through our studio was for Back on my Feet Baltimore. This amazing group uses running as a means to help recently homeless individuals get their life back together. The video we produced was for their yearly bash. We met and interviewed some extraordinary people for this video. The video received a great reception at the bash and was a huge success.

Another fun project was documenting the National Harbor Wine and Food Festival. We do quite a bit of work for Trigger Agency and they always have a great time hosting some of the best events in the region. This festival was no exception. We shot on-location during the two day festival, and put this video together with a fun fast-paced edit and eye-popping motion graphics.

We look forward to creating some great videos and websites in 2012. From all of us at Render Perfect Productions: Have a happy New Year!

Anatomy of a Company Promo

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Nikc Miller

Creating a web promo about Render Perfect has been a long time in the making. We’ve talked about doing one for years. We knew that just having a reel on our front page was not enough to describe the truly full-service brand marketing via video content that our company executes on a daily basis.

So why did we wait? Well, besides managing the day to day of working on videos and websites for our clients, it was just really tough to get started. The truth is that even as a video brand marketing company it’s difficult to look in the mirror and create the story for ourselves.

Writing and developing a script that we were all happy with was a painstaking process. But once we ironed out the details, everything came together fairly quickly. It was a valuable learning experience that truly evolved our web presence.

With that being said, here are 4 simple guidelines to get started planning your company’s web promo:

1. Share A Story Through Images

We wanted people to “get” our company quickly. We figured we could do this in two ways: show off a bunch of cool technology that we use and that most people probably don’t care about or explain our services in a simple way using creative graphics that are easy to identify.

In our opinion the best way was the latter; using motion graphics to creatively describe our service offerings. Creative graphics tell a story intrinsically and leave a memorable impact on the viewer.

2. Show Yourself

One of our biggest concerns when producing our video was making sure that we made a physical appearance within it. It is important for a potential customer to know exactly who they will be dealing with if they give us a call.

Many video companies hide their presence on their website. Sometimes it’s even tough to find out where their studio is located. This elusiveness-by-design is caused by the fear of a potential customer becoming turned off that the production company might be too small or that their office is located at the opposite end of the country.

That’s not the case with us. We are a small company. And we find our ease of scalability to be one of the things our clients love about us the most.

3. Short Is Better

Realizing that a web audience’s time is valuable and their attention is pulled in a multitude of directions, we wanted to keep this video overview as short as possible without missing any crucial information. The 1:15 runtime is the absolute longest we wanted to go with this video. Ideally shorter would have been better, but would not have been as complete in its message.

4. Create An Aesthetic That Emanates Your Brand

Similar to the way we wanted people to understand our services through the visuals, we also wanted our video to evoke a feeling. The video ends up being a sweet piece of meta-advertising showing at a glance that:

We design graphics and motion graphics.
We shoot video and interviews.
We post and use this video effectively.

By design, the video in itself is exactly what we offer: the opportunity to market with video effectively.

Powerful Web Video Marketing Comes To Towson!

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Nikc Miller

We’re excited to announce that we have moved our video production and web design studio to Towson!

That’s right, Render Perfect has uprooted and moved over to 604 E Joppa Road in Towson Maryland! This move is just the first of many exciting changes in the growth of our company. In the coming weeks we will be unveiling our newly redesigned website including blog posts and video tutorials on how to best use your brand’s content to gain efficient and effective web marketing.

Rest assured, we still offer all of the same services that we did in the past, just in a location that we feel is more central to our client base. We invite you to come check out our new studio and look forward to helping you make the most of your video and web marketing in 2011!

Download our V-Card here to make updating your address book easier.

Free Download: 10 YouTube Tips For 2010

Posted on December 29, 2009 by Nikc Miller

A few weeks ago we launched our new mini-ebook Produce, Post, Promote: Ten YouTube Tips For 2010 to our email list (you can get it here). The book has been very well received and was downloaded by people ranging from business owners to bloggers.

Alot of people have already asked me something to this effect:

Why would a video production company want to give away their own pro web-video tips to any ole person that signs up?

To me the answer is simple: I give this advice out to my friends all of the time. After typing up yet another email to one of my buddys about how to properly tag a video, I thought: It’s really time to (finally) write a guide!

The 13-page book contains tips on:

Planning an effective video campaign
Properly tagging videos for maximum exposure
Gaining new audiences with your video
Using your current marketing efforts to gain more views
And More (for real)

I’m always scouring the web for info so I know there’s alot of FREE (!!!zomg!!!) crap out there, so to prove that this little guide has alot of value, here’s Tip 11 (the one that didn’t make it in the book):

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Create A Click-Through Ad To Your Website For (Almost) Free:Alot of people immediately write off the Promoted Videos option that YouTube offers. If you aren’t aware, Promoted Videos works like Google AdWords. You can pick keywords and offer a pay-per-click price for each time someone clicks on your video for those words. If you are not interested in pay-per-click, you may have never experimented with this option. However, YouTube offers a big incentive for using Promoted Videos: A Clickable Call-To-Action Overlay.

This option gives you the power to place your very own ad on your video that clicks through directly to your site. The best part is that if you are not really interested in paying-per-click you can bid ultra-low on a super popular keyword. The result: You pay next-to-nothing because your video gets zero-to-low impressions, and you come out with an effective click-through advertisment for your video.

Check out this example!

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You can get the full-version of Produce, Post, Promote: Ten YouTube Tips For 2010 here. Did I forget to mention that it was free?

No Excuses For Ignoring The Company Blog

Posted on October 27, 2009 by Nikc Miller

I recently became a type of person I hate: a company blogger MIA. There’s no excuse for this, ever. But I’ll give you my excuse anyway:

We just revamped our website; transferring all of the old copy and writing tons of new stuff. We’ve also added a lot more video and will keep posting more as time goes on. Most of the focus was on design. Not cool Flash-y type design with lots obscure widgets that do weird things when you scroll over them. The design we are concerned with is info-design. See, we offer a LOT of services. But depending on who you are, you might be interested in, say, 10% of what we do. So the idea is to get the right person to the right content, quickly.

So my dilemma was more for convenience sake. I could have posted more. In fact, I have a ton of back-logged ideas. But it seemed to make more sense to get this site going as quickly as possible, instead of posting on a site that was going to be taken offline in a matter of weeks. We all have to make sacrifices.

There’s a good reason behind my ranting about infrequent posting and why it bothers me so much. See, I love researching companies. And probably the first thing I do is check out a company’s blog. Company blogs are kind of a new thing, at least for small-to-mid-sized businesses. It is plainly obvious when a company starts a blog for the right reasons and when they start one for the wrong reasons. The right reasons involve good candid thoughts, a recognizable theme, and consistent posts. The wrong reasons involve posts that just restate things seen around the web and a ton of posts published around the same time and then suddenly: nothing.

The idea of the bad company blogger conjures the image of a seedy businessperson who stumbles into a conference about SEO, social media, and Twitter. Leaving the conference motivated, she puts her top people to work on building a blog to quickly gain traction on the company site. After three months of real concerted effort, the company blog is forgotten for a new trend that has the potential to be even more “monetizing.”

As the bubbles settle from the social-media explosion of ’09, company blogging will become less about SEO and more about stating and building company philosophy. With that being said, expect posts here at Render Perfect on the regular, about one post per week. We like our new web presence and plan to be here for a while.