jack wells blog: Aquapax

Showing posts with label Aquapax. Show all posts

aqua man developed

I have been story boarding the aqua man sequence, bellow are a few shots from the full story board. I really want to get a nice atmospheric beginning with real shallow depth of field people shots.

After brainstorming and sketching i have kind of singled out a particular idea, my main inspiration for this is the Cadburys effective advertising particularly when looking at the gorila adverts. I want to use the product in the video that im making but not in an obvious boring 'look at this' kind of way. My idea is to produce a well shot short film thats unexpected and ultimately funny from the enexpected weird situation.

IDEA

The idea is to have a very large aquapax with some body wearing it and doing a stunt, i want the video to be well shot and definitely not have the 'amateur' feel about it. the idea is to have some body in roller blades wearing this so they are able to move quickly through people. the beginning should start with suspense and then a sudden reveal of some body in the packaging, music should be very epic so a power ballad style song would be perfect.

How to make Viral Videos!

This is a good video explaining about the strategies that some one believes works for them. Dan Ackerman Greenberg who made the video has written a fantastic article and bellow are the key point thats he talks about;

Content is NOT King
If you want a truly viral video that will get millions of people to watch and share it, then yes, content is key. But good content is not necessary to get 100,000 views if you follow these strategies.

Don’t get me wrong: the content is what will drive visitors back to a site. So a video must have a decent concept, but one shouldn’t agonize over determining the best “viral” video possible. Generally, a concept should not be forced because it fits a brand. Rather, a brand should be fit into a great concept. Here are some guidelines we follow:

Make it short: 15-30 seconds is ideal; break down long stories into bite-sized clips
Design for remixing: create a video that is simple enough to be remixed over and over again by others. Ex: “Dramatic Hamster”
Don’t make an outright ad: if a video feels like an ad, viewers won’t share it unless it’s really amazing. Ex: Sony Bravia
Make it shocking: give a viewer no choice but to investigate further. Ex: “UFO Haiti”
Use fake headlines: make the viewer say, “Holy shit, did that actually happen?!” Ex: “Stolen Nascar”
Appeal to sex: if all else fails, hire the most attractive women available to be in the video. Ex: “Yoga 4 Dudes”

Core Strategy: Getting onto the “Most Viewed” page
So how do we get the first 50,000 views we need to get our videos onto the Most Viewed list?

Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.
Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.
MySpace: Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages. We take advantage of this.
Facebook: Share, share, share. We’ve taken Dave McClure’s advice and built a sizeable presence on Facebook, so sharing a video with our entire friends list can have a real impact. Other ideas include creating an event that announces the video launch and inviting friends, writing a note and tagging friends, or posting the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.
Email lists: Send the video to an email list. Depending on the size of the list (and the recipients’ willingness to receive links to YouTube videos), this can be a very effective strategy.
Friends: Make sure everyone we know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook.

Title Optimization
It seems obvious, but people see hundreds of videos on YouTube, and the title and thumbnail are an easy way for video publishers to actively persuade someone to click on a video. Titles can be changed a limitless number of times, so we sometimes have a catchy (and somewhat misleading) title for the first few days, then later switch to something more relevant to the brand. Recently, I’ve noticed a trend towards titling videos with the phrases “exclusive,” “behind the scenes,” and “leaked video.”

Thumbnail Optimization

If a video is sitting on the Most Viewed page with nineteen other videos, a compelling video thumbnail is the single best strategy to maximize the number of clicks the video gets.

YouTube provides three choices for a video’s thumbnail, one of which is grabbed from the exact middle of the video. As we edit our videos, we make sure that the frame at the very middle is interesting. It’s no surprise that videos with thumbnails of half naked women get hundreds of thousands of views. Not to say that this is the best strategy, but you get the idea. Two rules of thumb: the thumbnail should be clear (suggesting high video quality) and ideally it should have a face or at least a person in it.

Commenting: Having a conversation with yourself
Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts. So do we. A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video. We get a few people in our office to log in throughout the day and post heated comments back and forth (you can definitely have a lot of fun with this). Everyone loves a good, heated discussion in the comments section – especially if the comments are related to a brand/startup.

Also, we aren’t afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, we just delete their comment. We can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.

We usually get one comment for every thousand views, since most people watching YouTube videos aren’t logged in. But a heated comment thread (done well) will engage viewers and will drive traffic back to our sites.

Strategic Tagging: Leading viewers down the rabbit hole
This is one of my favorite strategies and one that I think we invented. YouTube allows you to tag your videos with keywords that make your videos show up in relevant searches. For the first week that our video is online, we don’t use keyword tags to optimize the video for searches on YouTube. Instead, we’ve discovered that you can use tags to control the videos that show up in the Related Videos box.

I like to think about it as leading viewers down the rabbit hole. The idea here is to make it as easy as possible for viewers to engage with all your content, rather than jumping away to “related” content that actually has nothing to do with your brand/startup.

So how do we strategically tag? We choose three or four unique tags and use only these tags for all of the videos we post. I’m not talking about obscure tags; I’m talking about unique tags, tags that are not used by any other YouTube videos. Done correctly, this will allow us to have full control over the videos that show up as “Related Videos.”

The Lonely Island

The lonely island is a YouTube channel where there are a number of high production mainly music orientated videos, Lonely Island is team of 3 people, these are Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone. There most viewed is a video called Jizz in my Pants. I think there videos work well as they are very funny in content and ideas but also have been executed very well. bellow are there top three videos in order of popularity.

Jizz In My Pants

Like A Boss (ft. Seth Rogen) - Uncensored Version

I'm On A Boat (ft. T-Pain) - Album Version

cool factor!

When i first saw this i had to watch it again, its an amazing idea that is excited very well. basically its a suburu advert that uses a real car to make a flick book style animation.

"When approached to do a commercial for Subaru's powerful WRX STI rally car, creative agency DDB Canada had an unusual idea: Do a flip-book animation--by adhering 760 individual and precisely-spaced frames to a one-kilometer-long wall on a test track. Then mount the camera to the car, which whips along the wall, and once the driver hits a certain speed, the frames blend. Check it out:"

and the making of this can be seen here;

I really love how this is a great thing to watch and share yet still a very comercial product, to me this is a successful viral advert. there is a good quote that is said during the making of the video and thats that this has a level of 'cool factor'! i think this is worth keeping in mind when im finalising my idea.

Auto tune popularity

remixing videos with auto tune has become very very popular on you tube. there is one group of people in particular that stand out as they have a very large number of followers and regularly update there profile. these people are known as Auto Tune the News or The Gregory Brothers. bellow are some statistics from there channel page.

Name:The Gregory Brothers
Channel Views:13,806,220
Total Upload Views:164,465,662
Style:Variety
Joined:December 10, 2006
Subscribers:630,006193/

There most viewed video is called 'BED INTRUDER SONG!!!' and it has over 40 million views. They remixed a very funny news article that was already popular on the internet due to its accidental comedy nature. the person involved in this story now has become a sort of celebrity and has done numerous interviews across america souly down to the success of this video. bellow is the video.

There second most viewed video is the double rainbow song. with over 15,000,000 views this is also hugely popular. after the massive success of the original upload that wasn't intended to be such a hit. they remixed it and because of the massive following of the original this was an instant hit. the song and original upload is bellow.

How to videos

How to style videos are very popular on you tube, there is a section on you tube dedicated to just the how to videos. if you search the most viewed of all time then you will find out that the 'how to moon walk like Michele Jackson' video is the most viewed how to video with a total of 23,255,785 views. other top hitters are usually videos with girls not usually wearing much. for exampple the how to give thai massages are quite popular and so is the bra fitting guide video.

after looking at the trends in the how to video section in terms of gaining views you would have to upload a video that explained an experiment or how to do some thing that had mass apeal. or the other option and go on the basis that clearly sex sells on you tube.

bellow is a video about how to videos, its been made by a regular video blogger called TheWebbyAwards.

Rickrolling!

Thanks to a very common Internet prank called Rickrolling, the music video for singer Rick Astley's 1987 song "Never Gonna Give You Up" is one of the most viewed viral videos ever. Rickrolling is a simple prank—the prankster convinces his or her victim to click a link, telling them it's going to be one thing (like a funny video, an interesting news story, or whatever might interest the victim). But when the prank's victim clicks the link, they are taken to the music video for "Never Gonna Give You Up." That person has just been "Rickroll'd."

Accidental viral successes

Numa Numa

39,642,290
"Lip-dubs" is a genre of viral videos that's defined by someone on screen lip syncing to a song that's playing in the background. Numa Numa is the mother of all "lip-dubs."The video's creator and star, overweight and quirky Internet celebrity Gary Brolsma, taped himself singing along to Moldovan pop group O-Zone's song "Dragostea din tei." The combination of the incredibly strange song and Brolsma's weird dance moves made the video an instant Internet sensation that has spawned several imitators, but nothing beats the original.

Star wars kid
Star Wars Kid

19,614,041 views
Watching the Star Wars Kid is like driving by a car accident—you'd like to look away, but you can't. The video stars a reluctant and overweight French Canadian teenager who filmed himself performing light saber moves used by Darth Maul in the film Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. Like a lot of viral videos, this one will have you howling while you're watching it but will make you feel bad when it's over.

Afro ninja

11,772,138 views
Actor/stuntman Mark Hicks' audition tape—in which he falls flat on his head, gets back up and attempts to use a pair of nunchucks until he falls back onto the floor—has been viewed over 80 million times and remains one of the funniest and most satisfying viral videos ever.

Embrace Life

"Embrace Life is an award-winning short British public information film made for the Sussex Safer Roads Partnership (SSRP) about the importance of wearing seat belts. Released on 20 January 2010[1] and initially only shown in the local Sussex area, the short film became an international phenomenon after it was distributed on the internet, through social networking sites and YouTube, gaining over a million views in its first two weeks." infomation taken from the Embrace Life wiki page.

165,347 shares all time
11,821,591 views all time

http://embracethis.co.uk/
http://www.sussexsaferroads.gov.uk/

Research

I found a very useful viral video chart called viralvideochart.com. I paid particular interest in the UK Viral Ads chart. Its really helpful having all the UK distributed adverts all in one place with there statistics. Acording to viralvideochart.com there "chart is a collaboration between Unruly Media and the IABUK. It tracks branded video content that is produced or distributed in the UK and is based on the amount of times content has been shared on Facebook, Twitter, and in the blogosphere." Bellow is a break down of the chart.

Number 1 is "Evian Roller Babies international version"