A Work In Progress
Our recent World Irish dancing Championships project is moving along nicely in the edit suite. There is a serious amount of footage associated with this due to filming for a full seven days! On Thursday last we put a short 2 minute trailer online to create interest for the DVD when it’s due for release later in the summer. It has had a great response in the week since, getting 1000 views on it’s first day! You can take a look at it here:
I had a very good meeting yesterday evening with a guy who has invented a very nifty piece of industrial equipment. We talked about what can be achieved through the medium of online video for him and set a date for filming of his creation at work! This will be an interesting project and I’m looking forward to bringing in the new Sony EX3 and making him a nice HD video to aid his marketing strategy.
I added a little bit more equipment to the inventory this week so we’re constantly building our capabilities within Dundara Productions and VidiQuest!
Ireland is a good place to be a cameraman and editor at the moment. There is production of a good number of project both big and small going on right now and long may it continue!
Upgrading & Uploading!!
It’s been a crazy couple of months and I will not be complaining about that!!
Dundara Productions finished 2011 with the edit of a multi-cam shoot for The Black Knights Band. This was shot over the course of a very long day with 2 Sony EX1s and 2 Go Pros. We filmed five songs in the afternoon and then brought an audience of about 100 in for a live gig in the evening. Lighting was by Just Lite and sound recording by Sonic Cottage. The upshot of the entire project was 8 angles to choose from in the edit suite, a number of late nights, lots of coffee and thankfully a very happy client! Alan and the band were a joy to work with and I hope their videos which are now online are of great help to their marketing strategy. The finished product can be viewed on their website www.theblackknights.ie.
A little bit of an investment was called for in the new year so I went about upgrading and buying new equipment. So digging deep into the pocket I bought a new Sony EX3 XD Cam, a Manfrotto tripod with remote control, a Rode NTG3 broadcast microphone with boom pole and blimp and some other accessories like SxS cards, batteries, bags, card reader etc. On a trip to New York soon after I added the brilliant Go Pro Hero 2 camera to that. The Go Pro is just pure genius for it’s miniscule size and now it’s time to make that investment work!!!!
Thankfully I haven’t had much time to sit about and play with my new toys because it was straight into action with a big project for The World Irish Dancing Championships in Dublin. This involved a 7 day shoot, of which some were 14 – 16 hours long! It is a mammoth event and my job was to film the many different strands of the event to be edited into a documentary style DVD. In the middle of all that, a call came in from Setanta Sports to work with them to produce a TV advert for Mount Wolseley Hotel and Golf Club. So with that complete and now transmitting I’m, as we speak, doing an XD Cam transfer to bring all the Irish dancing footage into Final Cut Pro for the beginning of editing 25 hours of footage down to 75 minutes!
Now where’s that coffee machine..
VidiQuest.com Videos – The Beginning
In Spring 2010, after much thought and research, VidiQuest was launched. It might have seemed like an unusual time to start a new business as we were all beginning to realise the true extent of the dreaded “R” word. However it was my view that businesses more than ever needed innovative & creative marketing.
At the time an online video revolution as such was, and still is taking place. Studies were done and figures were already available which showed how online video had really captured the general public. People are viewing videos on the web in phenomonal numbers. The figures are staggering. You Tube alone has over 3 billion video views a day. That’s right over 3 billion! Or over 208,000 a minute if you like! The base viewership age has been determined to be between 18 and 54. And that’s all before we take other sites like Vimeo, company websites and social networking into account. In other words online video has huge viewership across a very broad age range and can reach figures that TV stations can only dream of!
Now I realised that I could start to build a company to produce online marketing videos at a fraction of the cost it would take to film and broadcast a TV ad. And have a far bigger catchment. It all made perfect sense!! I’ve been interested in media production since I was very young and as a child got my parents to bring me to RTE to watch television programmes being made. At age 12 I managed to convince them to buy me a video camera and spent the next 24 years teaching myself all aspects of production. So I was ready to use that experience and bring an almost obsessive compulsiveness as regards filming and editing to VidiQuest. Great isn’t good enough, it has to be perfect!
Contact was made with the beautiful Mount Wolseley Hotel in Tullow, Co. Carlow and this became the first VidiQuest project. Working with hotel director Lisa Morrissey, VidiQuest produced 2 videos. The first being an overview of the hotel and the second a tour of their golf course with designer Christy O’Connor Jnr. Lisa was thrilled with the finished products and so the videos were placed on the Mount Wolseley website, You Tube and onto my new site VidiQuest.com
Link To Mount Wolseley VidiQuest Video
So VidiQuest.com, which is part of my main media production company Dundara Productions Ltd had begun..
Blogging & Film Making!!
Videography and film making are all about communication.
And so is blogging!
So it makes sense to combine the two and blog about what we do within Dundara Productions.
2012 is shaping up to be a busy year for us as we build and develop new and exciting strands within the business.
It’s going to be a bit of a rollercoaster so come along for the ride!!
