Friday, May 9 2008

Video Killed the Radio Star

Is that a klieg light in your pocket, or are you happy to see me?

Back to the grind today, after an eventful and fun-filled three days of learning Lean Management and Value-Stream Mapping principles. As funny as it may sound, I really enjoyed the whole process of learning how everything flows inside our company, how to look at it correctly, and how to figure out ways to improve it. Plus, working with folks I usually only see in a pair of coveralls and a hairnet in the cellar, at company functions or just over email was great. Good job everyone. Kaizen, ahoy!

But back to the jute-mill for me. I'm getting my Winemaker Magazine conference presentations into shape over the next couple of days, and I'm refining the script for our video shoot on Monday. There's a lot of prep-work involved. Ever write a script? I've only ever written technical stuff, short stories and one play. TV is hard, believe it or not.

I used to do community TV stuff back in Maple Ridge in the late 70's and early 80's, and even had my own television show. Sort of. See, in the time slot we were in, regulations didn't allow us to broadcast a moving picture: we could only broadcast static pictures. So I actually had a radio show on TV. Cue up the old joke: 'You've got a face perfect for radio! Alas, the days of the Tom Foolery Radio Request Hour (my tagline, "I'm not Tom Foolery, this isn't a radio, and I don't take requests." It wasn't an hour, either) are long past, so I'm going to be helpful narrator, mostly.

But we're working with a great video production team, and the end product is going to be peachy: a video actually showing new people what it looks like to make a wine kit, complete with explanations for each step. One of the things that we're working hard on at Winexpert is to encourage people to try making their own wine. A lot of the stuff we currently do is pretty polished and good marketing, but getting new users into the winemaking lifestyle is really tough. I'm hopeful that a straightforward video showing how simple and easy it all is will do a lot of good in that area.

Soon to be showing at a small-screen near you! Also available by download, CD-rom, and any other format we can force into your pockets!

Posted by Tim AT 8:46PM

1 Comment

Post A Comment

Email