You wrote a great script, you have the camera, the drive, and your inner Seacrest is ready to shine... that is when things go terribly wrong. The following are three common pitfalls that can torpedo even the best video intentions:

1. Lighting – An under or poorly lit scene is a sure-fire way to kill your video. You don't need expensive professional light fixtures, but your first step should be to identify the main light source in your scene. Typically this is a large window (if you are shooting inside during the day), but could be the sun itself, overhead lights, or a nearby lamp. Standing in front of the window or light source is the quickest way to sink your video. Instead, position yourself so you are facing the light source and then turn about 45 degrees away from the light. Additional lamps can be used to light your background, or positioned on the other side of you (away from the window) to create a more even light across your face.

2. Audio – Poor audio is the first giveaway of an amateur video and another very common web video mistake. Generally when people think of creating their own video they consider the script, picture, and delivery, but rarely do they think, “Can my audience actually hear what I am saying?” Using an external microphone is always a good idea and almost always required to get great sound. You don't need the same mics used to record the Beatles White Album, but you should never rely on a built in, on-board microphone. These types of microphones, like the one on your iPhone, are omnidirectional and pick up any noise around your camera, like your computer fan, the receptionist next door, and even traffic outside. Using an external shotgun or lavalier microphone is the way around this problem. Professional wired and wireless mics for video cameras are relatively affordable (especially if you are going to do this a lot), but there are also options out there for your phone: http://www.smartlav.com/

3. Framing/Composition – Your one-minute of video is worth 1.8 million words (no, seriously, Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research counted), so what your audience sees says a lot about you and your business. Creating a visually interesting scene is critical to a successful video and also a common stumbling block. After setting up your lights, you want to place yourself and the camera in a manner that creates interest for the audience. Stage your background (add artwork, plants, brightly colored walls, but no computer screens, light sources, or windows) and then be sure to position yourself a good 5-10 feet in front of that background. Arrange yourself and other foreground objects (furniture, props, the dog) as best you can by following the Rule Of Thirds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thirds). If you are using your phone, resist the common urge to orient it vertically. For starters, nobody needs to see your feet, unless it's a video about shoes. Secondly, by shooting horizontally you conform to the way online videos are displayed and your video won't end up on youTube sideways or with big black sidebars. Lastly, make sure you can see the top of your head and just a few inches above it, because unless you are impersonating Lincoln, nobody needs to see all of your invisible top hat.

Of course there are many more tricks and tips that can help make your web videos more awesome, but paying attention to these three common mistakes will get you on the right track. Hopefully, you are now empowered to go try these techniques out and make great video, but if you are feeling overwhelmed, just call Sidecar and we can help ease your video production pain. Happy shooting!

Branding a company or product familiarizes the consumer with a specific product or service. It allows consumers to associate the personality of the company or service with their own beliefs, feelings, opinions, and experiences. If effective, a company brand will make a consumer feel like they can relate at a personal level

What does branding do for your company?

Branding is the key concept that identifies a product or service. Symbols, signs, catchy names, special offers, etc. link a company name to a specific standard of quality in which the company has set for itself. Creating a brand experience that is unique and special triggers a consumer’s memory to associate their emotional attitude with the identity of the product or service being offered

What is effective branding?

It is important to know what elements comprise of an effective brand and the brand’s identity.

Here is a list of the top 4 branding elements.

• Brand Name – Tabasco, Kleenex, and Pepsi: these names have virtually replaced the identity of the type of product that it offers. It is no longer simply hot sauce, tissues, and soda. Brand Logo – The Raisin Bran Sun, The Energizer Bunny, and The Keebler Elf- These logos bond the imagery to the product. When we see these brands, we think to ourselves, wake up and have some Raisin Bran, keep your electronics moving with Energizer and cookies made by little elves in trees are delicious.
  Brand Tagline – You can’t get any closer, you’re going to like the way you look, I guarantee it, and Just Do It reference products as well as the product’s expectations. Norelco, The Men’s Wearhouse, and Nike have concentrated their brand into a single catchy phrase that tells the audience about the company’s goals.

Brand Colors – A company’s colors must reflect the service or product they offer. Food packaging and logos should have colors associated with edible items. Orange, brown and red are all colors found in basic foods and 90% of all food packaging includes these. If the product provides energy the product colors will demonstrate an immense amount of energy; like the neon green of Monster Energy drinks.

Creating an effective and memorable brand and brand image comes from consistency. Consistency starts with determining a specific Brand Name, Brand Logo, Brand Tagline, and Brand Color that can be used on every form of promotional media. If these 4 key elements were to be consistently changed, the public would constantly have to re-identify and re-familiarize themselves with your product..

They weren’t exaggerating when they named the world wide web, you will literally be able to share your company’s video with anyone who has access to the internet. So, if this is the case then how does one use video to take advantage of the net for promoting purposes? Engage users in your video, distinguish an identity for your company, make it easy for them to find you by increasing your company’s web market share.

Today, there are many major websites that allow you to post and share videos, here are 6 of them:

1. YouTube
2. Facebook
3. Twitter
4. Google+
5. Vimeo
6. Your Own Website

Sidecar Fun Fact:
More than 500 years of YouTube videos are watched through Facebook every day.

For an effective increase in your market share follow the 3 easy steps below to interlink your social media sites with one another:

1) Make sure to upload your video to video hosting sites like YouTube and Vimeo so your media is readily available in any form for any device. During the upload process make sure to include a link to your website in the description so you can funnel more viewers to your company’s homepage.

2) Always share your video on your website and create a specially-designed and user friendly page for it.

3) Next, post either the YouTube or Vimeo video to your Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ accounts.

By creating an interlinking social media web you have a greater chance of attracting users, potential customers, to your website by capturing viewers from all the media outlets, like YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Plus, all this cross-promotion will help improve your video’s visibility across search engines.

Let’s test the “video increases market share” theory: type “Frank Nash Training Systems” into any search engine. The first search result is a set of links that will lead you directly to the Frank Nash Training Systems (FNTS) website, the second result is the company’s Facebook Page, the third navigates to Frank Nash Training Systems on Yelp, and lastly, there are 4 YouTube Videos, all posted by FNTS. All of these search results drive you to a carefully constructed market share created by Sidecar Productions for Frank Nash; promting users to “find out more” by visiting FrankNashTrainingSystems.com.

Checkout the video that started it all:

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It’s not just text that teaches anymore, and let’s face it, people are too lazy to read a bunch of text. If you are a small corporate company and don’t know how to establish your name on the internet, a video blog is a great way to introduce yourself, your company, and what you are all about.

If you are asking, “How do I create a video that represents my company?” below are some questions you will want to answer that can help create the foundation of your video blogging career:

• What message do you want to convey?
• What will the voice and tone of your blog be?
• What type of people do you wish to reach with your video?
• Who do you want to be involved?
• What is the strategy behind the content?
• What is the desirable outcome of each blog post?
• How will you make your video?

Our first week of filming was set at, Co-Producer, Greg Smith’s house. Though temperatures soared and space was limited in the second-floor apartment, crew spirits were high as we quickly learned to work as a team and became very efficient. Our Art Department did a magnificent job transforming Greg’s place into a bachelor pad from 1985 where our title characters lived before making it big.

For the second week of shooting, we moved on to shoot all the scenes which take place at Eternity’s favorite dive bar, ‘The Dirty Bird’. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday required our small crew to pack in and out of the Ruby Room at 5am and 5pm so the music venue could continue its day-to-day business. Paul Smith, owner of the Ruby Room, was with us every step of the way offering help, and graciously extended our allotted time on our first day. Again, our crew was up to the challenge (although sleep-deprived) and we got all the shots we needed. The last three days of the week took place at a house on loan from home-owners, Richard and Kathryne Thorpe. This “Expensive House” served as the lavish home of our title characters following their rise to fame. So, of course, in addition to gaudy décor, the place was fully stocked with a pair of DeLoreans, tons of Rubik’s Cubes, and an original 1982 arcade game.

Week three was our most challenging and ambitious week. Starting at a new location almost every day and managing large numbers of cast/ extras pushed the limits of our production team, but by this time we had already been working together efficiently and got the job done. The week started off in Point Loma, at Old Venice Restaurant, where we shot a number of scenes during the day. Later in the week, Jon Gries (Napolean Dynamite, Lost, The Rundown) was on set for three days to play the role of Barry Goldfield Jr., the band’s record producer. Barry’s father was portrayed by the great Martin Kove (The Karate Kid, Rambo, Cagney & Lacey), and the two paired perfectly together on screen as father and son during a record signing scene at Lou’s Records in Encinitas. Lou Russell, owner of Lou’s Records, was on hand to ring up many of the cast and crew members for purchases they found while working a long day in his store. We also had more than 30 extras on set that day to help us capture the enthusiasm for the event. A number of other scenes that week were shot at the old Department of Transportation building, including our imitation American Idol scene, an elevator scene, and all of Barry’s office scenes.

Saturday the 21^st was our final day of full crew and we were fortunate enough to have the talents of Eric Roberts on set; as the manager of BJ Maxx. St. Vincent De Paul Thrift, in Escondido, was transformed into our 80′s apparel store by our ever-impressive Art Department, led by Jason Kisvarday. Even more impressive was that BJ Maxx represented the third store overhaul of the week for our Art Department and they delivered again, adding incredible depth and texture to our world.

With the production phase of the movie now complete, our post-production team has a lot of work ahead of them, but we hope to have a final cut completed by early 2013. Again, thank you all for your continuing support during this great undertaking; we couldn’t have made it this far without all of you and appreciate your continued support. Congratulations to the cast and crew for a job well done, we are sure that all of their hard work will pay off on screen.

Thanks for all of the support and viva Todd Lucas.

I was terrified when I logged in to Plesk to find a bright red warning that I had exceeded my allotted server storage. My first thought was how is it even possible for me to be using more space than I had available. My second, and much more concerning, thought was that goDaddy was happily expanding my available storage to match my needs. Not because they are looking out for me, but because then they could stick me with a nice fat overage bill, like the cell phone companies.

Fortunately, the reality was much simpler and less costly for me. Plesk was just wrong. A quick check of my account control panel in my goDaddy account claimed that I had more storage than Plesk was reporting, which I confirmed by SSHing into my server and running the following:

df -h

The disk free command shows how much space is on each of your drives and adding the -h option prints the numbers out in GB, like us humans understand.

Plesk was under-reporting my storage by about 25%, which is obviously a significant difference when we are talking about hundreds of GB.

P.S. Happy Anniversary to my wonderful wife, Susie!

Today I got the word that a server was down, so immediately I pop up Firefox and punch in the URL, hoping it isn’t true.  Much to my chagrin, the little loading circle just keeps spinning…. which is typically the worst problem, because I get no feedback as to what is going on. My typical first reaction to this situation is to log into Plesk and see if I can determine the problem. No go, Plesk is not responding either. Now I know it is a server problem.

I have come to really like Tunnelier from Bitvise for my SSH client. It is free in environments with less than 5 users and has a lot of useful features. Once I was able to connect to the server, I knew that there was not an issue with the ip or DNS or something external to my box, so the next most likely culprit for the downtime is Apache.

# /etc/init.d/httpd status

The above code will tell you the status of Apache. In my case, the Apache server was stopped. Though I have found it to be rare, there have been times when Apache has stopped running or just needed to be restarted to get the web server going again. After seeing this, I immediately went for the easy fix;

# /etc/init.d/httpd start

Apache is the web server software that runs most Unix-based systems, so when it is stopped, the whole server comes to a halt. The above command line is how you turn Apache back on. Of course it was not that easy. When I ran the start command, I got the following error:

Starting httpd:
(98)Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address [::]:80
(98)Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80
no listening sockets available, shutting down
Unable to open logs

What this error is trying to say is that there is a process already running on the server using port 80 and now Apache is trying to use the same one, but the server won’t let it because it is busy. So, it is time to find out who is using the port.

# /sbin/fuser -n tcp 80

This will use the fuser function to find any process that is running on tcp port 80 (the -n tcp 80 just specifies that we want to find tcp connections for port 80). this returned a list of processes using the port, which in my case was a single process:

80/tcp: 1421

I could have also used fuser to kill all processes running on port 80 by adding a -k and that would have been sufficient, but I wanted to know what was causing the problem to hopefully make a long term fix. Now I know who is at fault and to find out more about that process I used the following:

# top

which lists all running processes by pid. Finding the row starting with 1421, I looked all the way to the right under the Command column and found out that the process was being run by fmsmaster. Aha! fmsmaster is the process that is run by Adobe’s Flash Media Server, which I also have running on the server. Now that I know who is causing the problem, I can turn off the FMS by using its own commands:

# /opt/adobe/fms/conf/fmsmng server fms stop
# /opt/adobe/fms/conf/fmsmng adminserver stop

Now that the FMS is not using port 80, I can turn Apache back on:

# /etc/init.d/httpd start

Bingo! The server is running again, the websites are back up and the world is right again. At this point, I could turn the FMS back on, but since it is not currently being used, I can leave it off to prevent this from happening again. Had I just killed all the processes running on port 80, I would not have know who was causing the problem and it may have happened again the next time the server restarted.

The joys of running a webserver!

We maintain a few different virtual dedicated servers, a couple for clients and one for ourselves and development purposes, all running on UNIX machines with Apache, PHP, MySQL, and some version of Plesk 10. So I get to discover all kinds of fun little things that come up, which keep things interesting and let me dabble a little bit in the harder-core nerd side of my interests.

What will follow in this category is a sort of catalog of some of the interesting things that I come across and the solutions that I implement to fix or modify the servers to achieve my goals, as ‘unlofty’ as they may be