The Festivus Film Festival Schedule was recently released, featuring the world premiere of the new Rainbow Chasers short film.

It is playing Thursday, January 14th at 9PM at the Bug Theatre in Denver. Come out for a night of cinema.

We also just stepped up our equipment array with a new camera package. The Sony EX-3 compact camcorder has an interchangeable lens system, three ½-inch Exmor™ Full HD CMOS sensors, each with an effective pixel count of 1920 x 1080, delivering stunning-quality HD images in 1080P, 720P, and 1080i HD resolutions.

We're excited to shoot lots of beautiful material with this camera in 2010. We'll also be offering this camera as a rental kit. Please contact us for availability.

Cheers to a great year everyone and keep looking up! Happy Holidays and a special thanks to our clients, family, and friends.

Of the 80% of viewers who had watched an online video ad, just over half had taken some sort of action. Nearly a third had checked out a Web site, while 22% had searched for more information, 15% had gone into a store and 12% had actually made a purchase.

Pam Horan of the OPA said, "With online video firmly entrenched in the mainstream, marketers need to understand what works for driving key advertising metrics."

PointRoll studied how online video advertising is relevant to brand marketers, and found that interactivity helps increase the time viewers spent with brands. When the video ad included or was surrounded by some form of interactivity — such as buttons to click to find out more or forms to fill out to register — it tended to increase average brand interaction time.

The below article was written by: David C. Skul

Traditional internet marketing, or Web 1.0 marketing, involved product and service marketing through static interaction, primarily text based web pages. "Brochure-ware" pages were just an extension of the traditional advertising model. Web 2.0 has turned this concept on its head. Potential customers are no longer restricted to reading static text about products and services. In other words, potential customers can interact with you—and the content you publish.

Enter video marketing, which plugs video into the interaction — giving Web 2.0 a whole new dimension. Despite the social characteristic of web 2.0, it still lacked the all important face to face interaction. This is where video marketing comes in. It allows you to blend your message and personality into the consumer's online experience, influencing the consumer in their buying decisions.

Benefits of Web Video Marketing

Video has an inherent appeal to audiences. Most of us want to "see" something before we want to "read" something. In the context of internet marketing, video can be used to enhance the consumer experience by educating the viewer about product or services, putting a face on a company, and building a company brand.

A video that demonstrates how a product works, with customer reviews, would provide solid evidence that the product can indeed solve a particular problem. It sets off emotional triggers that static text simply cannot do, ultimately influencing buying decisions.

On the flip side, video can also turn away customers. How? If a video doesn't show what a buyer needs, or doesn’t appeal emotionally, like a television station they simply click to something else. If the video is very poorly produced, and looks home-made, this can also have a negative impact on a viewer.  In the new world of social and interactive marketing, it's still better to have lost a customer rather than have dissatisfied customer.

The "on-demand" characteristic of video marketing is another great benefit. Videos can be downloaded and viewed anytime. Instead of losing customers to potentially boring text, they can take your information and view it when they want, even offline. Better yet, streaming video allows a viewer in instantly watch your video, without the need to download the file.

There are many benefits to video marketing. Not the least of which is an additional marketing message outlet. The more outlets you use, the more customers you will reach.

Interested in photography, film making, acting, or journalism? Whether a hobbyist or creative professional like myself, the Maine Media Workshops is an incredible resource. I'm currently spending two weeks here as a teaching assistant. I love coming here to recharge my creative juices, and to interact with other storytellers. Here's a link to a video on what the workshops are all about.