Tuesday, July 21 2009
I'm Ready for My Close-up, Mr. DeMille Part II
It comes up fairly often: "Just what do you do at work, Tim?", and not just from my bosses. My job is very difficult to explain or pin down. Yes, I do some drinking on the clock, but a lot of the time I sit and stare at a computer screen, or a pile of books,or reports, sometimes I talk to people on the phone or by email, and I have a lot of meetings, and all of it is about beverage alcohol in one form or another.
Trust me, I'm an actor!
But once in a while I do some very weird things. Like write, script, direct, star in, narrate, edit and produce videos. If any of you were the kind of kid who had their own news show sitting behind a cardboard news desk in the rumpus room, or did little plays with your stuffed animals (to this day Miss Piggy's turn as King Lear is my greatest triumph) you know that it can be fun, in a Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney kind of way: 'I know, we'll put on a show! We can use old man McNabb's barn! We'll sell tickets and save the old swimming hole!' And it is great fun, alloyed with a little terror when you're spending real marketing dollars and are supposed to turn out useful footage.
The latest project is for our 20th Anniversary Selection Limited Edition wines. For the last ten years I've put together presentations for both retailers and consumers that explain the varieties, regions, flavours and foods surrounding each wines, along with tastings of comparable commercial varieties, so folks can learn what to look for in the styles. It's been very successful, which is satisfying not just for the increase in awareness and in people trying the Limiteds, but also in proving a theory I had about this business that was pretty out-there a decade ago. I felt that we should stop selling wine kits. Let's face it, a rectangular box with a bag of juice inside, regardless of how pretty the graphics on the box or how breathless the copy about the box, is just a box: nobody but toddlers and kitty-cats care much about cardboard boxes.
Maru: contents may have shifted during packaging . . .
My feelings were that we shouldn't sell wine, either. I'm speaking metaphorically: we couldn't sell wine if we wanted to, we're a food manufacturer, not a winery. What I mean is we shouldn't sell the idea of the finished contents of the box either: wine is everywhere, and if we focused on the end product, why would people want to buy it from us? Even the huge price differential in making your own wine (typically one-third to one-quarter the cost of similar commercial wine) only attracts a limited number of people. The production period (fermenting, clearing and bottling) and the delayed gratification that it imposes aren't that compatible with our immediate-reward lifestyle, where most wine is consumed within 40 minutes of purchase.
I believed (and still do, even more fervently today) that what we should work on promoting is the wine lifestyle. By telling people not only the history and region of the grapes, but also the flavours and food pairings that go with it, we can tap into people's deeper desires to become more knowledgeable, sophisticated drinkers, who use wine with meals and plan ahead with cellars and varieties to enhance their lives. And what do you know, it seems to be the right approach.
In a way my time has become a victim of the success of the program. Since January of this year my schedule from the 1st of October until the 15th of December has been fully booked, every minute accounted for doing Limited Edition presentations in Canada and the USA. I'll put in a lot of hours, and even though I've enlisted the help of my friend Dave Larocque (one of the best wine educators in Canada) to do a bunch of presentations across Canada, there's still not enough time to go around to all the retailers who'd like to do a show. And that's where this guy comes in
Have camera, will travel
Jeff at Maverick Studios is our go-to guy for video production type stuff. A couple of years ago he recorded the Limited Edition presentation I did for our retail partners so we could ship it around and let all of the people selling Winexpert kits get a look at the line-up and the information, and it worked out really well. He also shot our 'You Made This' video (check out the intro here). He's a stand-up guy too, as you can see from the quality of the work he does (it ain't easy making me look good). This year we decided to extend the program and do a full-on, consumer-friendly presentation that we could have ready for distribution October 1st, when we announce the varieties.
Because we don't have all the graphics ready to go (bottle labels and colour schemes and a bunch of other thingys) we took the route of shooting on a green-screen. It's the same thing you see on the weather forecast, with the charlatan/meteorologist standing in front of a bunch of moving graphics and pointing out where they have no idea the weather will be. It's a great solution, and offers very good results, but man, it's demanding. Most of the good stuff (graphics, cut-aways, illustrations) happen in post-production. During the shoot it's just some dopey guy standing in front of a bright green piece of cloth, pretending to point and look at things.
Editing: furious concentration that closely resembles a nap
But it's looking pretty good at this point: we edited a short piece on how to taste wine, and the whole scheme looks brilliant once the post-work is all in. Now I've got to settle down and finish my notes on the second-to-second edit I need to do (complete with spots where I'll have to voice-over my mistakes) and get them back to Jeff so we can get this puppy burned to disc and ready to ship.
All in a days' work. A weird day, to be sure, but I have to admit, it's plenty of fun.
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