Lessons

Lesson Info

Video Fusion, Seniors, and Marketing

I don't do workshops. If I get asked to speak, I often do a one and a half hour keynote. I get so many emails to do workshops and I just have got so many shoots to do that I don't really have time to do workshops. So, when I come here, I feel like I have to try and concentrate that as much as I can into the days that you give me to share with you live on the internet. So, I try and hand over as much as I can and as much as I know you're asking for when you email me and tell me I wanna know this and I wanna know this and I think about where people are struggling and where I want them to be better. So my last day today, I've packed in as much as I physically can pack in the last day with me. Then, after I hand it over, I get to go out and party with these guys (laughs) and relax for the first night this week. So I wanted to share with you something that I've just done this month. I did a beautiful senior shoot for this girl, Anna. Now, we don't have a senior's market in Australia or in N...

ew Zealand. We, it's just not a photography genre. We've tried many times over the 20 years to launch a seniors market the way you guys have a senior's market. So, essentially, it's quite unique that your country has a genre of photography that really no other country has and a lot of photographers photograph seniors. So, I have quite a unique brand in the sense that, like I said yesterday, my brand is very attractive to teenage girls. So the seniors market for me has always been an easy sell, but we don't call them seniors, we just call them teenagers. So, I've always marketed to girl's day out and gone to the teenager to get the mother and daughter shoot. The mother and daughter shoot is the most lucrative shoot in my studio. So I always go, I always really entice that young girl so that she brings mom in. So when I apply what I do with teenagers to the seniors market in America here and for anybody else in the rest of the world who doesn't have a senior's market, who is just looking at the mother and daughter market or how do you hook the teenager? Because the teenager ultimately drives the consumer who is the mom, who has got the money, but it's the teenager that can make mom pretty much do and buy anything. So I hook that teenager with my brand and she hooks mom for me. And I know I can get that teenager, so for the states, this is about seniors, for the rest of the world this is about the mother and daughter. So we're gonna do that this morning. I'm going to talk a little bit more about power marketing real fast. So what I wanna do is I just wanna throw as many marketing ideas at you as I can in the shortest amount of time that you can actually go and apply in the next month to your business and I want you to pick up and run with any of these suggestions that I throw at you and then we can discuss them really quickly. I wanna talk about how I did this shoot and why it's so beautiful and so epic for me and what I loved about it and I've got a little bit of a behind the scenes shots to show you. I wanna talk to you again about Hailey Bartholomew, who I mention every single time I speak because she's the one that does these videos for me and I think she is the future of photography and moving image and it's coming, it's coming slowly, but it is coming, so embrace it now because it is a very strong viral marketing tool. And then I wanna power market and then we'll go to break and then I've got a really awesome mother and daughter map shoot for you. So this is the shoot that I make most of my money, it crosses two demographics, it gives me multiple referrals because the girl between the age of 15 and 19 has multiple girl friends that wants to do what she does and the mother and daughter relationship, currently in this social market, is a huge, a huge easy market to market to and a huge spend because they enjoy the process so much. So I wanna teach you how to grab hold of that and how to really make money from it. I don't see a lot of people crossing that demographic genre when they're marketing. They tend to go for the young girls that are midway, they kind of go for that younger twenties and you're going for a demographic that has less money. I go for the younger girls, again, I sort of cross that 15 to and get mom to come in so I open up that whole second demographic. So this shoot here I did with Anna. You have to learn something about a client in order to understand a shoot. So when I describe my shoots on my blog, I wanna tell you enough about Anna to keep Anna personal, but I also wanna tell enough about, to you, that you understand her story because we're telling stories with images and on my blog, you know, I waffle on on my blog and one long, rolling sentence of me, which is how I talk. So I write like I talk, but I don't remember ever saying I had a degree in writing or anything like that, so, you know, you get it. Basically Anna comes in for the shoot, she's 17 years old and she's ranked fourth in the world. So it's like Anna, let's talk to you for five minutes and find out something interesting about you. What's your favorite thing to do? "I run every day." You run? "Yes, I'm training for the next Olympics." You're training for the next Olympics, ranked fourth in the world, currently under 18, over 1,500 meters. Oh! Goosebumps. Wow. This young woman is a little girl with big, big plans. So I looked at her shoot, I said okay, I gotta picture on message, on text of what she looks like, a selfie and she's got long beautiful hair. She's the girl that is not a girl and not yet a woman. So it's like this is a quintessential senior shoot for me. This is something that I think she's crossing over in between I wanna be a supermodel, but I'm not sexing her out in any way, shape or form. I also want mom and dad, who are paying for the shoot, cause she does not work and has no income, to feel very comfortable with what they're buying. So I wanna cross that genre, like I talked about yesterday, between being a girl, not a girl and not yet a woman. So as I started to photograph this beautiful shoot, well prepare for the shoot, I realized I needed Hailey to come and shoot a behind the scenes video of her. And Hailey is just, Hailey's a storyteller at the highest level because she can she can see stories in moving form and then cut them together. And there are so many great little film makers and editors out there now that are just really coming into their own and grab hold of them and work with them because this is such a powerful media tool. So, I'll tell you about this shoot. Hailey Bartholomew is a kids photographer mostly. She's from Brisbane in Australia and I first saw her work when she started to do beautiful advertising for Jinky, jinkyart.com Amazing Australian kids photographer (mumbles) Absolutely incredible. She did a video for them and then I started to see her work and I rang her and asked her to shoot Simona's video for me which she did and I loved it and it's still on my website. And that video for me is just, I still can sing to it and watch it every day. I love it that much. When I asked Hailey to come back to do Anna's shoot, the interesting thing about Hailey is Hailey has a genre that is exactly the opposite to mine. So she's all about speed, hype, laughter, running, action, children. I'm all about slow, control, pose, relax your mouth, don't move, lift up, blow here. We couldn't be polar opposites, I don't think, we couldn't even be polar opposites in our personalities when you meet us, you're gonna laugh how polar opposite we are. And her genre speaks so loud to me even though I can't do it, don't do it, don't want to do it. And I, she doesn't even look at mine because we just went (screeching sound) we're just on a different track. And yet, I saw that opportunity as she understood Simona's mom's story cause she's a mom, mother of two, she understood the girls waking up in the morning playing and being a mom and then I took it into the studio to my zone so Hailey did her story and I did my story. My story was in the glamour studio making over Simona. And then I put it back to her family and sent her home again. That's Hailey's strength, that's Sue's strength. Now, as filmmakers or image makers, we want to play to our strengths, right? So I played that well. So with this one I decided if she's not a girl but not yet a woman, then Hailey will get her playful, crazy side, her kid side and I'll pull out the woman. So Hailey will capture the little girl in her and trust me, a 17 year old is a little girl. Okay? She's a little girl inside. She laughs a lot, talks a lot, dances a lot, is stupid a lot, and there's always that moment, if you remember girls, when you're 17. I don't know if the boys experience something like this, but there's that moment where you wanna scream and be stupid and people give you that look. You know? That grow up look. You know you get that and you'd be out in public and you're too loud or you're having too much fun and you're around that age group and all of a sudden it's that, you know, and you kind of start thinking I'm not a kid anymore. So this was really significant to me. I talked to Hailey about the shoot. Now Hailey does this incredible thing where she storyboards and she does a shoot list. So we write the storyboard and she comes back she goes "what do you think of this?" I go "I like this, I like this". I throw some ideas at her, we mix it up, we write a story that is like pitching a movie. We're gonna shoot it like this, we're gonna shoot it like this. But there's no story. Simona's was get up, get out of bed, this is just a capture of Anna, who Anna is. So it's not like telling a little story, it's just capturing all of it. So then what we started to do was we decided that she needed to be in different outfits, she needed to be riding. But mostly, she needed to be running because she's a runner. I wanted her in a beautiful dress, but I wanted her in flat boots. I wanted her to cross that look where she's at that age appropriateness. We put Hailey on the back of a bike. We pushed her around. But the best part about it is watching Hailey run all day after a fourth ranked in the world over 1500 meters (laughs) cause we made this young girl run up and down stairs. We made her do stairs over and over again and Hailey was behind her every step of the way. Except for Anna could run those stairs 20 times and she wasn't even puffing. She'd come down and she'd go, "Fun!" And we'd all be like (gasping for air) (laughs) So the idea was we wanted to tell this little story about this girl and we ran up and down stairs, we ran up and down alleyways, we ran up and down hills, we made her run up and down hills while we laid down and we just absolutely had so much fun shooting this girl and I would like to share that video with you today. Poor Hailey got a lot of exercise running around after this girl and we finished the day out just on sunset. It was one of the most beautiful experiences to watch the sun go down. We were frazzled and we had been working all day. It was cold in winter and Anna gave it everything she had. And so, this is her little story. ("Whole Wide World" by Mindy Gledhill) Beautiful. (clapping) Yeah. So we didn't get a very good audio in here, I hope the internet got it. But basically, that song was written by the same girl from triple scope. The same girl that wrote the song for Simona's video, Mindy Gledhill, an absolutely amazing vocalist from and songwriter from L.A. I just want to give some shout outs from the internet. We clapped here, but Kay Shiel says, "Goosebumps all over. "Great job Sue and Hailey. "Beautiful, omg, how stunning, magnificent "tears welling up." And you just, this is the first time anyone has seen this, correct? Yes, yes. World premiere. It is and you know what? The lyrics of the song is, "I'm just a little girl with great, big plans "and I just wanna hold the whole wide world in my hands." And it just, to me, it just sums her up. I'm gonna run right up this hill, I'm gonna learn to belly dance. You know, no matter what I do, I'm just gonna take a chance. Very, very cool. Alright for me oh hang on, I'm gonna start that off, I'm gonna go bounce back there. I really want to show you Anna's shoot actually and Mike, if you could bring up Anna's shoot cause I really wanna show you how her shoot unfolded through that day and the stills that she ended up getting and what she loved. For me, advertising this is gonna be easy because I feel like it's a connection that is so easy to who she is and what she does. So as the shoot unfolded, I would stop the video, you know, the videoing and every singe little location we ran up a hill, we went 'round a corner, we went up to the park, we shot against a wall, we shot into the sun, and then we went down to an alleyway and then we finished across the alleyway up on a hill, right on sunset. So I planned her outfits around as we were going through those four locations. So all very easy to bounce to and we wanted those big steers so that she could run up and down them. The bike is actually my bike. (laughs) I have a beautiful, big Amsterdam bike called Thelma, so she was riding my bike and we got her changed once and then changed her again so the changes were very, very subtle and you barely notice them. We added streamers and flowers and we just wanted to make it as fun as possible. And, at the end of the day, you can see Hailey coming out in the video and Sue come out in the shoot because it's definitely a cross of both of us. Wouldn't you say? Yeah, quite amazing. What I love about this I think also is I just feel like I captured her age really well. Yeah. Any questions about that shoot? What kind of camera did she use? It seemed like she was videotaping with a It's a 5D Mark 2. Oh, okay. Or a 5D Mark 3, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so she had, you'll see in one of the behind the scenes shots and she had the [Male Audience Member] Wheel? Sorry? Some kind of wheel, right? Yeah, it is, it's such an interesting it's not a steady cam because it's not balanced. It's actually really just gives her amazing opportunity to do different shots, but you can't push and pull focus cause you have to have two hands on the wheel. Although you can scoop down and go up high and do all sort of stuff with it. So she has a few different rigs like that. I actually thought what I want to do is bring Hailey Bartholomew to CreativeLive so that she can teach you how to shoot a show reel yourself and edit one and put it on YouTube. So I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna bring Hailey Bartholomew to CreativeLive at the end of January and I'm gonna get her to show you how to shoot on your camera a show reel that you can then edit and use in your viral marketing and create a story and do it because she is a genius at telling a simple story so beautifully. Yeah, I'm really, really excited about that. So there's Anna's shoot. You can see a couple of changes, I just want to point out. The dress and the jacket that Anna's wearing in the front are her own. The scarf, the little apricot scarf is hers. The little black outfit that she got into is from my shooting wardrobe because I just wanted to, for a little moment, take her into something a little bit more grown up and then we took her back into a beautiful little dress and the sequence when she was running through the alleyway where I added the flowers and shot into the sun flare. And that little top hat was a two dollar top hat from the dollar store. So it didn't have to be about expensive props or anything like that. It was just about fun and just making that just a beautiful series. I showed Anna every single one of those images and she didn't take any out and her and her mom just went, "We love them all." So I felt that it was a really good, a really good, I don't know, really good shoot to show. Really enjoyed it. Absolutely amazing, beautiful big canvas at the back and I wish her all the best. That little girl has big plans and I really hope she goes for the next Olympics. Alright. Now what I thought I would like to do is I would like to show you what I shoot in terms of just an everyday shoot that I would do to show my clients. I'm not gonna talk about selling, I'm gonna go back to marketing. Okay? Because I wanna come back to some ideas that we can market all of your businesses right now. So if we could just see Lauren's shoot up here. What I did with Lauren's shoot is I shot, I challenged myself to shoot Lauren's shoot mostly horizontally because I also captured video. Now fusion video is not a product yet because the public don't identify it as a product. But trust me, once these videos go out in our advertising and they realize what we are doing, once the public identify it as a product, then it will become something that people want. Once a product is market driven, we have to supply it because people are going, "Oh, well I've seen Sue Bryce's website "she does these videos. "Could you do like a video of my children?" And all of a sudden, you're crossing genres into fusion. So I wanna be an early adaptor and innovator so I want to start shooting fusion now until it becomes a product. But in the meantime, I'm using the fusion to advertise myself on every level because I want it to go viral, I want my bandwidth to be huge. So I came up with a couple of concepts on how I can use video. I started to shoot live before shots. So they've got no makeup on, you lock down the camera on a tripod, they sit down in a chair, they sit up tall, you put the camera at the top of their head, and you just shoot a three to four second clip of them sort of looking straight at the camera and everyone has that shy, unsure, I've got no hair and makeup, I'm in a ponytail, and then I would bring them back after their makeover and sit them down and their hair and makeup would be done and a whole different girl sits in that chair and next thing, they're sitting down and you can get them nice and tall, sitting through the pose, chin forward, and capture a little five second video just of them and their after shot. You can drop both of those MOV's that come straight out of the back of your camera on to Final Cut Pro, you can learn this on Lynda.com. You can drop them on to a timeline, a timeline means that when it plays, it goes along the timeline and it plays it in a linear, the way you captured it, then what happens is you can put a transition in between that fade them together really slowly. So if they're reasonably still or in slow motion and you transition those images together, they go from their before shot to their after shot in one little transition and that transition might take eight seconds, but it's, to me, what I call a live before and after. So image, then, that you can create a slideshow of the shoot. So, this is, I'm trying to teach you something with no video skill. Imagine then you just drop in a slideshow of the top 30 images of the shoot and you put that on YouTube and people get a visual before and after, go into the shoot that you've created and that's almost watching a live video. So if you're not there yet on the video thing, if you're not there yet in terms of not being able to afford video because a video like Hailey's can be five to eight thousand dollars for someone at her level and she works for her money. Did you know that after seeing her do two videos, I told her it should be 10,000 plus. I have never seen anybody work so hard for a shoot. I will also say this. I have no idea why this makes me emotional, but I'm gonna say it anyway, after watching her shoot, I sat down and I looked at her and I said, "In 20 years, I don't get that excited "by watching other photographers. "I don't." I've seen it all. It's like wow, yeah, you're good. You have a high hit rate, whatever. You know, cool. That's awesome, props to you. I have respect for you, but I'm talking about that feeling when you sit behind a photographer and they're knocking out a shoot and it's making you go, (breathes in deeply) Oh my god. She does that for me. I have never sat behind anyone, not in fifteen years and been that impressed. So to bring her here and watch her shoot a show reel for you, I'm just, (shrieks) it just makes me but the best part is is I get to tie in my clients and my story with her incredibleness. And that excites the hell out of me. So ways to tie in a shoot would be I did a before and after of Lauren. I did a live before and after. I'll transition the before and after and then I did some beautiful little captures just in between. A mixture of behind the scenes and through my lens. There's a very big difference between shooting something behind the scenes, so seeing the photographer and the assistant, and then shooting from where you are actually taking the still. And I can mix it together as a fusion video and that might not be a sellable product yet, it will be, it's coming, but that is a great marketing tool. Great for my website, great for YouTube, and something you can do right now, correct? Yeah. So, just before we go on to the break, I just want to bounce a couple of more ideas to you and one of them is before I finish, sorry, before I view my images, so before I take them to the sales level, back to where I'm seeing my beautiful shots, I'm loading them off, my client is leaving the studio. Okay? I've said goodbye, we've had a coffee, whatever I'm doing. I call this the entice image. Okay, I just wanna throw this out there. Some people really, really can't get their head around this. Some people get their head around it immediately. So it's just an idea, this is what I've been doing. What I do is I load off my images, I do the whole chill out. After you have your shoot, you're a little bit wound up and I pick my favorite image just straight out of, straight off the sort of grid. I'm looking at the images on my computer and I go "oooh, bang!" And I know when I shot it that that was going towards where I really want to nail it. So for me, that shot there up on the wall, that beautiful big canvas, that obviously was gonna be the shot that I sold to, that I sent, sorry, to Anna because I just pulled that straight up out of her image bank and I put it straight into photo shop. Now this took me two minutes. I opened this image in photo shop. I retouch it, okay? And then I load it into a file called gorgeous. I have this file on my iPhone that I call gorgeous and everybody I've shot in the last six months is in this gorgeous file and there's just one shot of them. And what it does is two things. When I'm out and about and I haven't got cards or I'm on the fly, or I'm at the gym, or wherever I am, I might be out on the fly, but I am never without my cellphone. Okay? I even sleep with my cellphone close by so you know, we are attached like nobody's business. So that gallery called gorgeous is on my iPhone and it's right there for you to see. So anytime you strike up a conversation with me, I'm like I'm a photographer. I not only have relevant work, I have real work. So not just the best of my best, but every client and their best shot. So I have a good cross section of ages, demographics, and I have a relevant and contemporary gallery on my phone that's good to go. Not just work I took 20 years ago, but the best of that I'm doing right now. And they flick through this gallery. Now this gallery has 250 images in it now, so it is so impressive, this gallery, in terms of it being a high hit rate that people just sit there for an hour and then they pass my phone on and it comes up in dinner. My friends actually get sick of me doing it because they're just like, Oh here goes, once they get hold of that gorgeous gallery it'll be all like, well we want to do a shoot with you soon. (laughs) Anyway, that's what it's all about. So entice me is about the one thing that people are when they leave your studio, they are a little bit tired from being worked so hard and stretching and posing, they're hungry cause they've been with you for three and a half hours, so they need to go and eat, and they're a little bit nervous cause they don't know if you actually got what they wanted and they're really excited. Okay? Cause we really excite them. Now the biggest mistake that people make is that they, is that, do I show people the back of the camera? Okay? And yes, I do show the back of the camera, but I only wanna show the back of the camera twice. Once or twice. Sometimes I don't show the back of the camera because I want them to get a glimpse that I'm getting what they're getting, but it has to be really good so that they feel comfortable. Now instead of showing the back of the camera, now remember sometimes you're posing someone that doesn't like something about themselves like a double chin or a gel or a scar. Now if you show them the back of the camera, what are they gonna look at? Yeah, they're gonna look at the thing they don't like no matter how good the shot is. But when I finish the image, I take the best one straight off, whack it on photo shop, I photo shop it two minutes, load it onto my gorgeous file, so I update my gorgeous file, and then I send it on my phone to my client who's driving home. Okay? Now two things happen right now. First they either text message me or call me immediately. And because it's been photoshopped, finished, and I've chosen this image as my favorite, they're always like, Oh! Wow! I cannot believe that you have given me this image. I cropped that image two by three, 72 DPI, so it's nice and small. It's not gonna be printed and even if it is, it's a digital file, okay? I give this image on. 99% of the time, sometimes not, I always have that 1% that don't, 99% of the time that image is on Facebook by the time I come back from my lunch break. And it's not on my Facebook with a watermark, it's on their Facebook with a tag to me. Now, is it better for me to advertise a client's shoot or the client to advertise me? [Female Audience Member] The client. Yes, because a client referral comes in one times, 100 times stronger than me saying look what I just did. So what I then do is I bounce that, my client bounces that back to me and by the time I come back for lunch, I can have anywhere from one to five people in my mailbox going I wanna do a shoot. I just saw Kate's shoot and I wanna do one too. And what it does is, you're giving something away to them straight away. Now, people always say what if they don't buy anything? And there you go, if they don't but any other images because they got a two by three at 72 DPI, they were never going to buy from you. They just weren't. Maybe they just wanted the experience, I don't know what. Maybe they didn't like their images enough to buy from you. There's lots of reasons people don't buy. But the truth is, is for those of you that advertise it, for the 99% that put it on Facebook, you just got free marketing and advertising and it cost you only what you were gonna do anyway. Okay? So yes, there is always the person that won't buy. That's the law of averages and that's what we do in business. We have the non-buyers, we have the buyers, we balance that average. But that entice image, and I call it the entice image, you are welcome to call it the entice image. Here's the problem with it, okay? There's a little bit of a problem with the entice image. One is when I get too busy, I stop doing the entice image. Now my referrals quadruple when I do the entice image. So if I get too busy to send this image, I miss out on four more shoots for free. Okay? Secondly, if you know someone that's been photographed by me, you know they got an entice image. So when you don't get an entice image and you know that it's coming, you go I never got an entice image and I've let them down. So if you're gonna commit to this, you commit to it with every single client. Everybody has a smart phone and android phone, a stupid phone that takes pictures now and everybody has something that they can cross that media and if they can't have it on their phone, you can email it to them. Small, small enough to Facebook media. But it is such a great way to share and entice other people and it's a great way to give something instantly to your client and they just flip out over it. Right? Alright, so let's just something that works for me. I photographed this beautiful woman, Melissa Brown. I hope you're watching, I know you probably are from Sydney and if not, you'll be watching on the re-watch. Melissa rang me up and she said, "I wanna do the whole experience with you, "I wanna rent a warehouse, I wanna do this shoot, "I've got these beautiful outfits all picked out." And I enjoyed shooting her immensely. When I went home from the shoot, she was like I just can't wait, I can't wait, I can't wait. So I sat down to do an entice image and I actually sent her two. I sent her these two images and Melissa was a mixture of one of those clients that just had, just a huge, a huge love for what I do and enjoyed her shoot so much that these sort of clients when you meet people that you really connect with, I call them evangelists. They just support your business so much. This woman not only shouted out me on her Facebook and every media that she had, her husband did, her friends did, and her connection around me did and it became, one little free shot, just became something incredibly viral. Her husband friended me on Facebook, he bounces comments off my Facebook page about his hot wife. You know, she bought 30 beautiful images in her image box and she changes out her profile shot on Facebook and every time she does, she tags me in the change and I love it because her shoot was just magnificent. So that costs me nothing. It cost me nothing but the gift of giving her that enticement and it really just got me so much work and now I try and do it all the time. So where I fail is if I get too busy and I stop doing it and I pay the price for it. So, if you can put this into your service, I want you to do this right now, yeah.