Archive for » July 20th, 2010«
Beauty is one of the important elements, which needs to be incorporated into a corporate video. People are naturally attracted to look at something which is beautiful, whether it be a beautiful object or a beautiful segment of a video. A video with beautiful content, like a video with unique content, is more appealing to viewers. Finding beautiful content to present to the public is a unique challenge for every industry, because each industry has beauty in a different form. Locating the beauty and presenting it, will greatly enhance the appeal of a corporate video to the public.
Finding that which is beautiful in a given industry is a unique challenge for every company making a corporate video. The source of the beauty is not always so obvious.In a company, which provides large above ground containers for volatile fuel, for example, a photo of the production plant with row after row of these large steely containers sitting in a lot waiting to be delivered has beauty in symmetry. A video made for an environmental group, has a much more obvious source of beauty, and it will serve to prove my point.
The environmental corporate video by Edward Wallace can be found at http://vimeo.com/3217927 . The Canadian environmental protection organization that produced this video has a very conspicuous source of beauty. It is important to point out, this corporate video has not merely thrown beautiful scenes into the video, to attract attention. The beauty of untrammeled nature relates directly to the purpose of their organization, which is to preserve these wild pristine places. This is essential. The video is not merely throwing in beautiful images to attract views so that it can then deliver the message. Rather, in a very real sense, the beauty is the message. In that sense, and in this usage the video illustrates the famous poetic adage that “Beauty is Truth and Truth is Beauty.”
The incorporation of beauty into a corporate video, may not always be done so appropriately. For example, if a mountain climber reaches the summit of a tall mountain, and a video captures exquisite footage of a snow capped mountain summit, a breath-taking panorama and the perilous drop below, there is certainly beauty within the segment. However, that beauty is not intrinsically related to the wrist watch which has continued to tick despite the rugged trek to the mountain peak. The sturdiness of the watch, in fact, is one of its minor feature compared to the beautiful intricacy of its dials, wheels and or digital circuitry, which never miss a beat and keep accurate time for years.
In the wrist watch video, we see that the primary beauty of the mountain summit has been transferred to the primary object of the video, the watch, even though it is not beauty that intrinsically belongs to the watch. Such a tactic can work at times, but it can also backfire as the viewer is secretly thinking, “You mean you have nothing intrinsically beautiful about your product to show me?”
When, as in the environmental video, on the other hand, the beauty directly relates to the message of the video, a resonance is created, because the increased attractively directly touches on the heart of the matter. The beautiful imagery, furthermore, imbues the video with a certain degree of sincerity and even passion. People watching the images of the environmental are moved to want to save the environment as they see the morning sunlight glistening through the trees, and here birds singing their morning songs and watch as a herd of elks standing shyly in a broad shallow creek, turn to look, with mild concern, at the humans filming them from a distance.