When tackling a new project, you’re usually conditioned to think things will be straightforward: get project done by deadline and stay within your budget. Simple, right?
Not always.
More often than not, we run into issues that both lead us to going way past our deadline and over our budget. It doesn’t have to be like this. Regardless of the size of your project, there are many ways to keep things on track.
1. Stay organized
All projects need a proper project manager – someone to maximize time, budget, and resources that’ll lead you to the finish line. Have a proper upfront meeting that can clearly establish the goals of the project – either laying out what kind of shots you want or what story you want to tell.
2. Know your scope
While successfully finishing your project is the end goal, you have to take into account all the steps it takes to get there. Each step is equally important as each step in your project depends on what came before it. Managing the scope of your project helps your stay on track
3. Proper feedback
Provide feedback that contains your input as well as a solution. Giving feedback that simply says that it’s not working for you or not what you want, makes moving forward toward your goal much harder than it should be. Providing next steps and ideas to make the project more to your liking, and reasonably so, will keep you on the right track. Adding more time to figure out what works best will ultimately cost more money.
4. Be prepared.
Have content ready to be implemented in order to finish out your project and meet your deadline. Let’s say you’re creating a brand new website. Not having content ready during the development phase of your project can easily put you behind. What good is a pretty website without the copy and photos to fill it ? Stay on track.
5. Know how to use your rounds of revisions
Make use of your rounds of revisions to either edit or improve the content already provided, not add additional content. Adding additional content which will also probably be revised only extends the project, rather than meeting your original deadline. For instance, if you decide that after x amount of revisions that you want to start over with, say, different colors and fonts, that will end up costing you more. Another example would be going into a fifth round of revisions, when your scope only included three rounds. This will not only extend the project, but will also end up costing you more.
Having a less-stressful, easy and successful project is not always a reality, but is a possibility. Document the time and steps taken throughout your project and you’ll already be one step ahead. Stay organized and revise accordingly, knowing full well how you’re project should be progressing. It’s always a learning game and will be an experience that’ll keep you on track for the next project you undertake.
We teamed up once again with our clients over atDTZ and Cushman & Wakefield, for a property shoot in and around Montgomery County, Maryland. Our purpose for this shoot was to showcase 9 (nine) different property listings available to be used for various marketing materials aimed toward future tenants.
Over three days, we made stops all over the Rockville, Bethesda, and the Downtown Silver Spring area, capturing beautiful shots of each of the properties, various floors that include the lobby, tenant spaces, and aerial views from the property rooftops. In addition to this, we captured several surrounding amenities that capture the desirable features available for each properties in the heart of each city (restaurants, shopping, etc).
Below are some behind the scenes images of the shoot.
We recently teamed up with Keller Williams Capital Properties (KWCP) for a video shoot in honor of their RED Day event. RED Day, which stands for Renew, Energize, and Donate, is an annual event where the KWCP associates take a break from the office and serve worthy organizations and causes in their community.
We visited two locations for our shoot: Woodbridge, VA and Anacostia in South East Washington, DC. Our shoot consisted of interviews with four members of the KWCP team, going in depth about the importance of RED Day and what it means to the company and the communities that surround them. Along with the interviews, we shot the KWCP members at task with assigned service duties at each location. It’s always a great experience to see worthy communities being helped and RED Day was a great example of that.
We recently worked with our clients at DTZ on a property shoot for Arlington Tower, in Northern Virginia. The main purpose for this video was to create an efficient edit that showcases their latest property listing, one of the tallest buildings in the DC region, by capturing multiple tenant spaces to be used in various marketing materials for the property. We shot time-lapse footage of several different angles of the building as well as various floors including the lobby, tenant space, and rooftop that uncovers the wonderful views of the DC/MD/VA area from atop the building. Below are behinds the scenes photos from the shoot.
In today’s market, consumers have the mindset of I want it now and I want it fast that it only makes sense that they’d rather watch a 1-3 minute video containing the important information that sums up the ins and outs of your business in a creative, visual manner instead of reading paragraphs of visually-unappealing text. Successful businesses all have videos that market their company, and the longer a business waits to produce one is another day their competitors stay ahead of the game. Customers watch more video. Plain and simple.
Stats to Consider:
78% of people watch at least one video on Youtube
More than 500 years’ worth of Youtube videos are watching daily on Facebook
700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter every minute
50% of mobile traffic is due to online video
75% of executives watch work-related videos on business-related websites at least weekly
70% of the top 100 search listings on Google are video results
BLM spent the morning at the Team Eckenrode gym in Kensington, Maryland to meet with our client, personal trainer, Dave Taylor. We conducted a video and photo shoot to coincide with the upcoming website we’re currently designing and developing for his company, Real World Strength Systems. As with most of our videos, we filmed an interview portion, highlighting the offerings and benefits of his company, as well as Dave working in his environment, training a few of his clients in various training demonstrations.
Below are some photos from the shoot to giving you a behind-the-scenes look at the production.
A few months back the Bright Light Media team shot a real estate video showcasing the many features of a property currently for sale, One Fairfax. It was a two-day video shoot. We started at the offices of Cassidy Turley in Washington, DC to film the heads of the company for the interview portions of the video. We then head over to shoot the property on location in Fairfax, VA a couple days later. The on-location shoot began very early in the day in order to create that great time-lapse shot for the opening of the video and continued throughout the day to shoot all the various areas and amenities that One Fairfax has to offer. We took photos throughout the shoot to give you a look behind the scenes of the final product, which you can watch above.
