Guest blog--Doug Malcolm, from Cortron Media, Pittsburgh, PA
In the way of introduction, the video promotion you see on my web pages was directed and produced by Doug Malcolm of Cortron Media. This is from Cortron's weblog (with permission, of course!):
Friends are certainly a great resource!
One of mine is a wonderful voice actor named Tony Chiapetta. Tony narrates TV ads, video presentations and audio books with great range and skill.
One day, Tony asked me to look at what our company could do to promote an audio and hard copy book written by his friend, P. Michael Henninger. We arranged for “Mike” to visit our production studio.
His thriller, titled, “Terms and Conditions,” captured the imagination of our crew right away (we liked Mike, too). In it, people are drawn into signing on for a digital game that takes over their lives by showing a spooky omniscience of details of their daily existence, and continually prompts players to take questionable moral actions and to harshly avenge anyone who has ever slighted them!
It seemed very apparent that this exciting book would make an excellent candidate for a movie-style “trailer” video to promote it online to the world. Of course, the first step in our process was to read the book and map a strategy.
Undistracted, I’d say you could read the book, easily, in two or three days. It’s a page-turner and the chapters are short and episodic. But I was limited to late nights and a weekend for my reading, so I got to ponder the book for about ten days. That was fortunate, though, because when it finally came time to write the trailer script, it just rolled out onto the page.
That process was fun, too, because I got an opportunity, with the split page format for video script writing, to offer suggestions to our excellent editor for the types of imagery or video footage that could be used to “cover” the words of the running narration. And, with “Terms and Conditions,” we got to be a little bit campy and uncork some slightly tongue in cheek elements designed to scare and mystify!
The video is available to see here. You can judge how we succeeded. But the response, to date, has been overwhelmingly positive!!!!
Creating a neat, little video doesn’t mean that much to our client, though, if we don’t empower it to reach the audience he desires. That’s why (due to the virus) we held a virtual meeting with Mike and gave him direct access to our in-house social media guru, Rob “Bobby Blaze” O’Brien. During that session, we reviewed each of the online platforms that Mike is currently using to promote his books (be sure to check out his excellent “Casablanca” series) and created the best strategy to incorporate the video trailer onto those platforms. As usual, we also looked to do other marketing, including running Facebook ads designed to reach potential contacts in Hollywood.
This was one of Cortron Media’s first forays into using video production to promote a published work and the response we’ve received from a well-established publisher, as well as the general public, has been overwhelming. So, we are particularly grateful to a good friend and great voice, Tony Chiapetta for introducing us to the wonderful author P. Michael Henninger!
Friends are certainly a great resource!
One of mine is a wonderful voice actor named Tony Chiapetta. Tony narrates TV ads, video presentations and audio books with great range and skill.
One day, Tony asked me to look at what our company could do to promote an audio and hard copy book written by his friend, P. Michael Henninger. We arranged for “Mike” to visit our production studio.
His thriller, titled, “Terms and Conditions,” captured the imagination of our crew right away (we liked Mike, too). In it, people are drawn into signing on for a digital game that takes over their lives by showing a spooky omniscience of details of their daily existence, and continually prompts players to take questionable moral actions and to harshly avenge anyone who has ever slighted them!
It seemed very apparent that this exciting book would make an excellent candidate for a movie-style “trailer” video to promote it online to the world. Of course, the first step in our process was to read the book and map a strategy.
Undistracted, I’d say you could read the book, easily, in two or three days. It’s a page-turner and the chapters are short and episodic. But I was limited to late nights and a weekend for my reading, so I got to ponder the book for about ten days. That was fortunate, though, because when it finally came time to write the trailer script, it just rolled out onto the page.
That process was fun, too, because I got an opportunity, with the split page format for video script writing, to offer suggestions to our excellent editor for the types of imagery or video footage that could be used to “cover” the words of the running narration. And, with “Terms and Conditions,” we got to be a little bit campy and uncork some slightly tongue in cheek elements designed to scare and mystify!
The video is available to see here. You can judge how we succeeded. But the response, to date, has been overwhelmingly positive!!!!
Creating a neat, little video doesn’t mean that much to our client, though, if we don’t empower it to reach the audience he desires. That’s why (due to the virus) we held a virtual meeting with Mike and gave him direct access to our in-house social media guru, Rob “Bobby Blaze” O’Brien. During that session, we reviewed each of the online platforms that Mike is currently using to promote his books (be sure to check out his excellent “Casablanca” series) and created the best strategy to incorporate the video trailer onto those platforms. As usual, we also looked to do other marketing, including running Facebook ads designed to reach potential contacts in Hollywood.
This was one of Cortron Media’s first forays into using video production to promote a published work and the response we’ve received from a well-established publisher, as well as the general public, has been overwhelming. So, we are particularly grateful to a good friend and great voice, Tony Chiapetta for introducing us to the wonderful author P. Michael Henninger!
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