The Process
Introduction | Video Services | Your Element
Voidcomp’s production process is flexible; we are able to provide services to take a project from concept to completion. We can also be a link in the production chain. We regularly provide support to other projects and organisations who need a specific role filling or task completing.
The company and its team has been built on the idea of specialism and creativity. Specialism refers to the areas our team provides a service for, we don’t believe a one person crew can produce any project effectively. For example, a camera person might not be a good sound recordist – both roles are vastly different and require different mindsets, skills and experiences. Yes, a graphics artist might be able to use a computer but might not have the communication and story telling skills to be a video editor.
We utilise professional specialists to fulfill the main roles required by a project. This combination of individuality ensures the product is created professionally, without a weak link in the production chain.
Creativity is ‘topped up’ in every single stage of the project. The more people involved in the project the more that level of creativity is added to, because the team generate ideas, techniques and nuances that affect the final product.
Pre-Production
It all begins on paper with an idea. The message and story are the reason this medium exists; having a strong idea and effectively planning how to achieve it is the start of the production process. This is our chance to listen and understand your needs, before presenting ideas and solutions.
Production
Production is the technical practice of recording the visual and auditory material required to tell your story. Principal photography puts our pre production plan into practice. This is precisely co-ordinated between our team and your own to keep you informed on how the shoot is progressing. The process will vary on each shoot.
Post Production
Post production is an art and science. The video is ingested into an editing system, and using the script worked out in pre production the footage is combined and cut into a final video or film. The phase involves colour grading the video, mastering the audio and adding any motion graphic elements.
Dissemination
There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you. Getting your story to the right audience is as much of a priority as any other stage of production. This could be virally via social networking, online hosting through YouTube and Vimeo, broadcasting, optical media or a combination of all.
The Small Things
At Voidcomp it’s the small details that count. Attention to detail throughout a project is key to success, all small things feed into the big, complex and all encompassing final story. We would like to share a few of the ideas for dealing with issues that at first thought might not seem relevant to our clients.
In any agreement each party expects to get what they pay for. The majority of projects are now created digitally, with the benefits of higher quality, speed and lower costs. But these benefits come some dangers, loss of data is one of those dangers. Voidcomp backs-up our client’s project and files while working on it every hour of every day while it resides in our servers.
Data loss is not just the corruption of files, but can extend to the physical damage or loss of hardware. Our backup system is both on site, and off site, allowing your project to remain safe, no matter what. After the project is complete we can provide you with a hard drive containing all of your digital files. Alternatively, we can store them on your behalf, making any changes or additional updates to the project seamlessly.
Our team operates in a creative industry. Yet some organisations who specialise in creative business don’t create suitable environments for creativity and innovation to flourish.
Some of the ways we achieve this is through operational freedom. Team leaders co-ordinate projects, resources and people but are not managers. Money is managed, time is managed but a person / team should be inspired, trusted and developed. We strike the right balance between finishing every task on or before time and giving the team the freedom to work when they feel the most creative, using the tools they find the most comfortable.
Change is another factor that influences output quality, especially creative output as fear or closed minded thinking does not translate well for a creative process. Voidcomp is fluid, we accept change is inevitable and move with it, allowing us to understand and develop tools, ideas and procedures.
Other methods such as positive brain storming, vito agreements, in house projects, encouraging youth input and leading by example all help to create the right environment to tell the best stories we can, in the best possible way.
It seems simple. Pay a professional video company to shoot a project and expect great quality video. One specialism in the production chain that is often overlooked is the end quality of the video. The final medium for the content, along with the audience and technological limitations define the quality of output. And the method for controlling quality is compression.
Video and audio compression is the technique of reducing the amount of data used to show digital video files. Most video we see day to day is compressed. DVD, Blu-Ray, Television, YouTube, you name it and video compression plays an important role for allowing our devices to watch the content. The tools that allow an editor to compress the video signal are built in to editing software. This software has presets for different levels of compression which, at a first glance should work fine.
This isn’t always the case, compression is a science in itself and should be treated with respect, frame by frame and project by project. No matter how good the original video was a poorly compressed final product makes all the hard work and expense worthless. We use dedicated software and specific techniques to create both standard definition and high definition video files that go beyond using templates, presets or off the shelf solutions.
