You may well ask where the chicken has been for the past several weeks. I apologise, the chicken has been busy making movies. Yes even the chicken gets out now and then.

For those of you have signed up for our newsletter, this will not be news to you, but we have just finished work filming and editing the new TV and Radio campaign for Silverburn (if you’ve never been you should go - it is a mecca for shopping). Working again with Threebrand, we wrote all the ads this year, after our work last year on the ‘Red Dress Ads’ which you can check out by clicking here.

This year we went back in time with an homage to the great 40s detective films and in the series of 5 TV spots and 5 Radio Spots we meet our grizzled detective and his seductive client/employer/suspect? It was fun recreating the look and feel of those old films. The shadows, the suspense, with a great original music track from Chris Bradley - an incredible talent and one to watch for the future! You can see the first ad by clicking here, and you can hear the first radio ad here.

If you are a follower of the stock market, it seems that every Monday at the moment is Gloomy Monday - they seem to have been getting progressively gloomier for sometime now. It’s not long before we’ll arrive at ‘It Can’t Get Much Worse Monday’, ’Edge of Despair Monday’, and finally ‘Totally Suicidal Monday’

It has been clear for some time now that the economy is suffering. Up to now people have been hoping it would remain in the financial sector, but it is rapidly making its way through to the real economy, and at the end of the day, that’s you and me, our companies and organisations. People are nervous of spending money, and when that happens one of the first things to be cut is spending on communications and advertising and marketing.

The thing is that often companies don’t want to cut back on their communications; they know that now is just when they need to speak to customers, clients, staff and stakeholders. But the budgets they have for those communications have got much smaller; they have to work more effectively and efficiently and achieve the same for less money.

So we in the chicken coop say bring it on. That’s what we love doing; finding new and innovative ways of communicating with an audience when budgets are tight. We have a host of ideas to get the most out of every single shilling you’ve squeezed out of your finance department, and would happily share those ideas with you. So call us.

Haven’t scratched anything for a couple of weeks now… been busy launching an album, and trying to raise finance for a film. Yes… it’s all chicks to the pump in the henhouse at the moment. More about the film later… that’s very exciting. But this week a departure.. the chickens have been rocking the house and appear to have become a record company. We were launching the debut album of Chris Bradley last week.

‘Voices’ (Splashing Duck Records), was unleashed at an event on Thursday at the Speakeasy in the Voodoo Rooms in Edinburgh. Press and fans packed in (and I don’t think it was just for the free booze) to hear a great set by Chris and his band.  He ran through songs from the album and just for good measure threw in a few new ones (is there no end to his talents) and got a truly great reception. You can hear and download the album here.

Oh and while we were at it we got the fantastic artist and animator David Lemm to create a music video for the soon to be released debut single ‘To My Ears’. If you click through on nothing else from this blog, then click here to watch it, because it is truly a masterpiece!

The Mercury Music Prize connection… William Hill are tipping Chris to be big and are offering odds of 33-1 that he’ll win the Mercury by 2010. The chickens are scratching together their corn and are going to pop a few quid on. Remeber you heard it here first.

Many people say I can’t read (being a hen…) but I can, and on Sunday, while relaxing in my hammock and nibbling on poppy seeds, I saw this appalling article in the Scotland on Sunday… frankly it’s outrageous. If I could fly further than a few feet without dislocating a wing muscle I’d fly over wiltshire and give them something to think about… those poor chickens, only used to the lovely wide open spaces of that nice free range farm, pecking gently amidst the scattered corn seeds and occasionally laying an egg, all cooped up in the back of a car… it’s enough to make you start thinking of Sunday lunch… and not in a good way!

Anyway, that’s enough ranting from me. Next week we’ll be back to films!

 
A ‘Tipping Point’ is reached when ”the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable” - or so said Malcolm Gladwell in his excellent book on the nature of tipping points. In his book he remarked on the shape taken by an epidemic, that it can reach a point when suddenly it spreads like wildfire, everyone catches it, and then just as quickly it can die out. He then took that shape and applied it to all sorts of situations in life. He used the ‘tipping point’ argument to explain how films with tiny budgets or books by unknown authors can suddenly can suddenly become world-wide hits based simply on a spreading word-of-mouth.

Although the dimming of the lights part of the analogy is probably not the case with HD TV, with the launch of freesat at the beginning of the month finally offering people the opportunity to realise the potential of those huge HD Ready TVs they all bought two Christmas’s ago, is this finally the tipping point for HD TV.

Certainly some large corporate have been producing films on HD for a while now, even though they have often only delivered it to staff and customers on Standard Definition, because the infrastructure to watch high definition pictures just hasn’t been widely available. That is certainly now changing. Blu-Ray DVDs are becoming more popular and it won’t be long before the internet can offer subscribers broadband that can deliver true HD pictures. Certainly within some companies their intranets are already working towards this.

This month we produced a number of short films shot on HD for a client who provides television and internet systems to hotels and who are about to launch a full HD TV delivery platform for hotel clients. Other clients want to shoot on HD to start building an HD library of footage for future projects. The momentum to HD is certainly growing and will accelerate.  

A bit of a break from film this week. I have to say, I have developed an unnatural obsession with the US Presidential Elections, and have become an avid follower of every twist and turn in the race. It seems to me and everyone else  - although not yet apparently Hillary Clinton herself - that the primary result is all but over, but the intricate manouverings taken by her campaign team over the past few weeks to subtly move the goalposts about what she needs to do to win have been masterful.

Boy can that lady fight. I honestly thought when she was at her victory rally in Indiana that she was going to jack it in, and the look on Bill’s face behind her only reinforced that feeling, but she hasn’t. Instead she has spent the intervening two weeks trying to persuade everyone, but especially the super delegates that she has really been the winner.

When she started this process and was favourite to wrap it up by Super Tuesday, she seemed to think the process was fine, but as it slowly dawned on her that she was losing on the pledged delegates count, she started trying to play the electability card to get the super delegates behind her. She would be the only nominee to bring home the swing states, where she won big in the primaries. Finally she has tried to make it about winning the popular vote, including votes cast in a primary election where Obama wasn’t even on the ballot because it had been declared void by the Democratic Party. Hardly seems democratic does it?

I don’t know whether today’s primaries in Oregon and Kentucky will finally bring to an end this incredible contest, and it can surely only be a matter of time, but credit to her and her comms team for managing to get the media to engage with her changing ambitions for so long. That’s communication!

PS Is it just me, or am I really cynical? When Obama was in his hole over Jeremiah Wright, everyone expected the pastor to go on TV and make conciliatory remarks; well he didn’t. And don’t you think that made it easier for Obama. He could distance himself from this ‘radical’ pastor more easily and move on. It put the issue to bed for a lot of people. If Wright had actually apologised, the issue may have dragged on and on. Wright doesn’t seem like the sort of person that would bend his principles or position for anyone, but I just wonder if Wright spoke so forcefully on purpose, knowing that it might actually help out the presidential hopeful.

 ’The problem with communication … is the illusion that it has been accomplished.’

George Bernard Shaw said this, and what a wise old dude he was! We spend a fortune on communication. We print lovely glossy brochures, we make films, we host seminars, we cascade information through our organisations and then we assume that we have communicated, and more importantly we assume that our audience has heard us and understood what we wanted them to understand.

I had a friend  who was organising a golf day for the local community charity. He carefully had lots of nice posters printed and then stuck them up in every single pub in his part of town. Result - not one person phoned up to take part. Why? Who knows? (Sorry there aren’t many answers this week, or even many opinions, just observations). Maybe being in a pub, people were too inebriated by the end of the night to remember they’d seen the poster. Maybe there wasn’t a single person in any of these establishments that liked golf, or maybe the poster (carefully drafted as it was) just didn’t convey the information he wanted it to in a way that made the people that saw it want to act.

Those of us who work in communication can sometimes get so wrapped up in the creative process that we forget to think fully about how those communications might be received. Communication is a two way process and if we forget our audience for even a minute then we aren’t doing our jobs properly. Film can help communication by presenting arguments simply and clearly, and engage with both sides of the argument, as Scottish Water did when building the Glasgow Water Treatment Works in Milngavie. Alternatively of course, as communicators we can all just be down-right bloody minded, and this is genius.

These days people communicate entirely differently with each other than they did even five years ago. Often we don’t even speak on the phone any more, we set up social engagements by text message and even then use a condensed form of langusge. People don’t want long-winded documents to read anymore. They don’t want long winding films, they want their communication short, to the point and entertaining, then they’ll listen.

I think however you decide to communicate, and clearly we believe that visual communications can play a hugely important part in any comms strategy, the most important thing is to communicate in a way that makes sure you are heard and more importantly understood and acted on.

Let’s assume you’re about about to make a film. (Maybe you are and that’s why you’re here, maybe you’re here because you were looking for advice on keeping chickens and you were momentarily distracted and took a wrong turning at google; whichever it is, now you’re here, stay and join in the hypothesising!)

So you’re about to make a film, how do you approach it? Some people come from the let’s get our CEO on screen telling us all how things are. There’s nothing wrong with that, especially if you have a really charismatic CEO, but should that be the limit of your boldness.

Often we think we come up with really creative, clever ideas, only for clients to get nervous, or think they won’t get the right message across in the right tone to their target audience. But often being bold can pay dividends. When Scottish Water agreed to our suggestion to get George Wylie, the elderly Glaswegian artist and a man of definite views, to present a documentary about the new Glasgow Water Treatment Works at Milngavie, they were taking a risk. But by doing so they brought a real sense of insight and passion to the finished film, and it gave the programme a certain something it would not have got with a ‘televison presenter’.

When the Ardbeg Distillery was brought by Glenmorangie and re-opened in 1997, they wanted to create a film that celebrated the fact. Originally they wanted the film to focus on the distillery itself, and interviews with distillery workers and managers. But the distillery had been so important to the community, and it’s re-opening such a rebirth for that part of Islay, that we persuaded them that a film told from the point of view of the community would be more powerful. The finished film used a soundtrack recorded live in a pub during the actual shoot, and was based around the thoughts of those people who had lived through the years of the distillery’s closure.

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There are lots of companies doing amazing things with film and video, animation and graphics, and often the more you open up to what is possible, the more you can get out of the film you are creating!

The thing about the web is it doesn’t stand still. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, something else comes along. Three years ago whoever would have thought social networking sites would become the juggernauts they are now. And YouTube has become more than simply a place for odd videos (see our Channel – no odd videos there), it has become a research resource for people. When Kevin Keegan rejoined Newcastle United, Oba Martins didn’t know anything about him, and started his research by looking for old Keegan goals on YouTube. I hope he didn’t find this!

For companies as well, the web is changing. People or customers visiting websites expect more than pictures and text now, they expect moving images, they expect websites to be exciting interesting places to go.

Some companies are using their websites to host films that promote them, like Intense. Some of the most innovative companies have gone even further than that.

What are you doing?

 For our clients, making films is an enjoyable, collaborative, creative endeavour, which produces something for them of real value, whether they are making something to gee up their troops internally, or raise their profile externally. They enjoy it because we really do try and take the worry and troubles off their shoulders. And in the case of the shoot on the right for Northlink Ferries, we pass it onto the shoulders of Lighting Cameraman Jan Pester, who carried around that steadicam rig for three days!

For some people new to the process however it can be a little daunting. You don’t know how developed an idea you need, or how you might schedule filming, or who you need to involve. Don’t worry about that – we’ll guide you through that process, but for a quick and slightly irreverent guide to making corporate films, this guy from the States has some pretty good advice.

Come back to this blog, we’ll be writing it every week, with news of what we’re doing, and links to other interesting bits and bobs.