Video Production - Digital Zoetrope

DZ Produces Video for Eckerd Connects Charity Event

by Mike Misconi | Jun 1, 2023 | Corporate Video, Video Production

The power of visual storytelling is undeniable, especially when raising awareness and funds for charitable causes. One example is the collaboration between Digital Zoetrope Productions and the Brevard chapter of Eckerd Connects charity. DZ’s video production skills came to the forefront as we created a captivating video for Eckerd Connects’ annual Perfect Pair charity event. The video featured a father and daughter that were helped out recently by Eckerd Connects’ staff and program.

Eckerd Connects is a renowned organization committed to improving the lives of children and families in need. Their annual Perfect Pair charity event combines the excitement of a casino game night with a delightful dinner, making it an enjoyable and interactive evening for attendees. This event provides a platform for community members to come together and support a worthy cause and generates crucial funds to fuel Eckerd Connects’ philanthropic efforts.

Eckerd Connects enlisted the expertise of Digital Zoetrope Productions to create a compelling video that would showcase the organization’s impact and highlight the importance of community support. Digital Zoetrope Productions, who have donated services and supported Eckerd Connects for over 10 years, eagerly took on the task.

DZ collaborated closely with Eckerd Connects’ team, conducting interviews with the program’s beneficiaries, and staff members. These personal accounts provided invaluable insights into the transformative power of the organization’s work and served as the emotional core of the video.

The video was filmed in 4K using Digital Zoetrope’s Sony FX9 and Sony a7siii cameras, along with some of our new lighting equipment like the Aputure 600D.

Hopefully, we effectively captured the essence of Eckerd Connects’ mission and translated it into a powerful visual narrative. The video plays a crucial role in elevating the impact of the Perfect Pair charity event, ultimately helping raise vital funds for the organization’s important work.

Digital Zoetrope Productions was proud to work with Eckerd Connects on this project, just as we’ve been honored to work with them over the last 10 years. You can watch the video in its entirety below.

Here are a few images from the video.

Eckerd Connects Perfect Pair Video — Eckerd Connects’ Talia Bryant

Digital Zoetrope and L3Harris win Best of Show at the 2021 Space Coast ADDY Awards

by Mike Misconi | Feb 24, 2021 | Awards, Corporate Video, TV Commercial, Video Production

A video that Digital Zoetrope Productions produced for L3Harris’ EWeek 2020 celebration won both a Gold ADDY Award and Best of Show at the 2021 Space Coast Advertising Federation’s ADDY Awards.

EWeek or Engineers Week is a national celebration that promotes science, engineering, and STEM education. L3Harris, a Fortune 500 Aerospace and Defense Prime, annually holds events throughout their company and often commissions a video to put out on social media to help celebrate. Digital Zoetrope Productions has produced several of these videos over the year, but in the 2020 version, the idea was to tell a story about a boy who is inspired to become an engineer after watch a rocket launch. The video follows the boy’s journey as he grows up to ultimately fulfill his dream.

The video was shot over the course of two days on location in Palm Bay, FL, and was shot using a RED Dragon-X camera.

The concept, developed by L3Harris’ outstanding marketing team and Digital Zoetrope, was received positively when it was released year. Winning the Best of Show award is the crowning achievement for the cast and crew who put this video into motion and we were proud to be a part of it.

4 Reasons Why Videos Are Great For Your Business

by Mike Misconi | Aug 10, 2017 | Corporate Video, TV Commercial, Video Production

A Guest Blog by Katie Conlon

As a business owner, you’ve likely heard that “content is king” when marketing is being discussed. Written content can be effective for many audiences, but in 2017, visual marketing is a much more powerful tool if you’re looking to increase interactions, conversions and sales.

Integrating video into your marketing strategy is the best move for your business and not just because it’s a popular choice today. Video offers advantages you can’t get from written content.

Here are 4 of the many reasons why your marketing strategy should include video:

Rank Higher on Google

Google’s algorithm considers more than 250 different factors when creating search rankings. One of the more important ones is called “dwell time,” or how long visitors stay on your website. We don’t have access to this data, only Google does, but the idea behind it is that if consumers and viewers are spending a lot of time on your site, it must have high-quality content. One of the best ways to attract and keep visitors on your site is with a short video of high quality content.

Reach More Potential Customers

One of the benefits of using video in your marketing campaign is the expanded reach that comes with it. Video marketing provides both business owner and customer, access to free, high traffic sources like YouTube, Vimeo, and Daily Motion. These platforms may be the most cost-effective way to get your product or business out to the masses.

If you create a video and post it on youtube, embed it on your website and share it on other social media platforms, you will also reap the benefits from a Google Ranking perspective. Those video links with high-quality content, will help boost your reach and rank locally, which, in turn, will broaden your reach and increase your rank.

Infuse Personality Into Your Brand

Video is one of the best ways to inject your personality into your message. It can establish trust, and connect with potential customers on an emotional level–which is something written copy struggles to achieve. This is partially because most written copy comes across as boring or sterile, and when marketers try to hype it up with exclamation points, capitalized words, and italicized sentences, it looks childish and unprofessional.

Your visitors are looking to do business with a company they know, and trust. If you’re a genuine business person who provides a great service or offers a great product, relying on a nice logo and anonymous web copy will only lump you into a mediocre group of your competitors. Video will help you stand out amongst the crowd, and be recognized for your merits.

Professionalism

Integrating video into your business strategy and onto your website shows your viewers your company embraces technology, and is both adaptive and creative. Viewers will equate the quality of your videos with the quality of your product or company. This is why video marketing is crucial to your business, but it’s also why you need to hire a professional videographer.

Your marketing videos need to show a high degree of professionalism, one that is not easily attained by an amateur. Trust a pro to set up the right shots, stage the perfect lighting and achieve the highest production value. A videographer has both the expertise and the proper equipment to shoot a perfect marketing video for your business. Tools like a lighting rig, a gimbal stabilizer, camera monitors, and camera jibs, are all necessities. An iphone just won’t cut it these days, because the success of your business is on the line.

Video marketing will make a lasting, human connection with your customers; you can use it to show visitors you’re more than just another faceless online operation and relate to them on a deeper, more emotional level. This pays off in the form of extended reach, credibility, and relatability, which will in turn lead to more sales.

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After Effects Laden Annual Report for Intersil

by Mike Misconi | Jul 30, 2015 | Corporate Video, Post Production, Video Production

Recently Digital Zoetrope Productions produced an Annual Report video for the Intersil corporation. The video is designed to inform the public of the company’s successes and direction for the upcoming year. To create the video, we used a mixture of live action footage, still photos and motion graphics. The project was done almost exclusively in Adobe After Effects CC 2014, with each scene as an individual composition that was then sewn together in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2014. We then added the music and voice over.

Color Correction and the Sony F5

by Mike Misconi | Jul 10, 2015 | Post Production, Video Production

Recently, Digital Zoetrope Productions worked with filmmaker Daphne Stacey to produce an independent film entitled In A Moment. The film was shot exclusively with our Sony F5 Cinealta Digital Cinema camera and utilized that camera’s S-Log2 gamma curve setting. What the Sony F5’s S-Log2 gamma setting allows you to do, is to record a scene with a “flat” picture profile that keeps most of the original information from the camera’s sensor. Essentially, this profile is as close as the camera can record to a RAW setting without actually using the AXS-R5 RAW Recorder with the Sony F5.

Shooting in S-Log2’s flat profile allows us to color correct the final image immensely without sacrificing image quality. S-Log2 preserves the dynamic range of a shot, meaning that information from both the highlights and shadows are recorded for use by your editing/color correction system. In the case of In A Moment, color correction was done exclusively in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2014 utilizing a combination of built-in color correction filters and Look Up Tables (LUT) from James Miller’s excellent Deluts collection.

Here is a sample of the difference in the S-Log2 footage and the color corrected footage: (Click to enlarge to their original 4K size)

Original S-Log2

Color Corrected Canon F5

The above sample was color corrected using Miller’s Liverpool LUT at 20% opacity and Adobe Premiere Pro’s RGB Curves and Fast Color Correction effects. This helped us achieve a dark, somber mood look to the footage.

Original S-Log2

Color Corrected

This sample utilized Miller’s Lichfield LUT at 100% opacity and Adobe Premiere Pro’s RGB Curves and Fast Color Correction effects.

Original S-Log2

Color Corrected

Lastly, this scene was color corrected using Miller’s Lichfield LUT at 100% opacity and RGB Curves and Fast Color Corrector. The saturation was also increased to about 120% since the mood of this scene is more hopeful than the previous two scenes.

New Intersil Video on Orion Program

by Mike Misconi | Apr 2, 2015 | Corporate Video, Post Production, Video Production

Recently, Digital Zoetrope Productions completed a corporate video for Melbourne, FL based semi-conductor company Intersil about their involvement on NASA’s Orion program. The video details how Intersil had several integrated circuits (ICs) in the Command Module on the Orion spacecraft.

The video was shot at Intersil’s Palm Bay, FL based facility where they make radiation hardened ICs. It was shot primarily with our 4k Sony F5 Cinealta camera package. We also utilized our Canon 60D DSLR package as a “B” camera. In addition to several interviews, we also filmed several scenes inside Intersil’s clean room facilities where they fabricate and test the ICs.

This project is one of many video productions that Digital Zoetrope has done for Intersil, but it certainly was one of their more interesting projects to work on. Not only was it a challenge to film in a clean room environment, but it was also a pleasure to work on a project that has to do with our nation’s space agency. The Orion project, with it’s eventual planned mission to Mars, is the United States’ next generation of space craft that will continue our country’s space exploration program.