Today LooseKeys turns two. It feels like just a couple weeks ago that I left Daily Planet ltd. and ventured out on my own to build this business. There hasn’t been a single day that I’ve looked back and second guessed my decision. 

It’s been an amazing journey with over 70 videos in our portfolio, some awesome clients and support of so many friends and family.  

If one year ago I had felt like I learned a lot, this year proved that I had no idea what I was doing because I was presented with a number of new challenges that I had to overcome. The biggest hurdle was in management of a team. This past year the team grew and Jake Williams came onboard full-time. One step closer to world domination… The team has been building steam and hopefully I’ll be able to add another person to it in the near future.

After two years, I think we’re doing something right over here. I’m slowly making sure that LooseKeys is more than just an animated explainer business. We’re storytellers, artists and with each video we do we’re able to show why clients pick us over the other guy. 

Thank you everyone for the support!

2013 has been a good year so far for us at LooseKeys and it just got even better, we won three Silver Communicator Awards. 

The first one was for “The Smarter Wallet from Lemon” for online video animation. Mike and I had a blast working with Lemon on these videos and it’s awesome to see one of them winning another award. Next up was the “Viadeo Company Pages” video in “Branded Content - Business to Business” category. That video was really LooseKeys first exploration into live action video, so it’s awesome that it won a Telly and now a Communicator Award. Finally, our Boxee TV video won in the “Branded Content - Business to Consumer” category. 

All three of these videos span multiple styles, which really shows off what this talented team can produce!

Our Meet Boxee TV spot for Walmart won a 2013 Bronze Award Telly Award for Use of Animation in the Film / Video Non-Broadcast Productions category.

The other day I got an email from another company that wanted me to contract LooseKeys work out to them. A bit of a strange request because why would I want to unload work that LooseKeys can do… It’s always a little flattering to get  emails from other explainer video and production companies because it means that someone is noticing what you’re up to. I took a look at their portfolio and found something very, very, very similar to the Lemon video that I had created. The colors were similar and two of the characters were basically the same; tossing a tie onto someone doesn’t make it different. Over the years I’ve grown accustom to seeing Groupon video clones either in the script, illustration or the animation.

This one was a surprise, since it was the first time I’ve seen the Lemon video copied. My email response to them was pretty simple; I told them that they must have really liked the Lemon video that I did and left it at that. I figured that would be the last I hear from them. But no, they responded and said that they had never seen the Lemon video and that it was just a coincidence. Son, Please! 

What to do here… spend hours arguing with them. Taking screens and placing them side by side to prove that they basically stole the work? In the end, I decided to take the high road on this one and not push it or take it much further than that.  In this case I wasn’t threatened by them trying to take work from me or LooseKeys  If a client wants to work with someone who steals other peoples work, then that’s not a client I want.  

I did share the video with a few friends and colleagues, just so they’d be sure to watch out for their own stuff. It seems like this has been happening more and more lately; other companies or people ripping off videos that me or people I know have created. There will always be imitators out there but those guys don’t last; just be sure to rise above them. The authentic ones will always stand out above the rest.

It seems like every startup has a video on their site demo-ing or explaining their service. But are they getting watched? At the rate I skip through commercials on TV, I often wonder if anyone is watching these product commercials or explainer videos online.

The best part about this type of online content is that you know that people are watching. The video I worked on for CamScanner was viewed over 30,000 times in a week on YouTube and when the folks at Resultly posted their video on YouTube it was played over 8,000 times in a single day. That’s just a couple examples but I’m not sure how well these two videos were promoted by the businesses. So someone is watching and that’s good for me since this is mainly the sort of content I’m creating and I’d be out of business if all of a sudden people stopped watching video online. 

An explainer or demo video for a service is different than a commercial. The goal of a commercial is typically brand awareness or to sell. Plus a commercial is getting in the way of what I really want to watch.  

An explainer video is there to educate and convert viewers. It’s a bit more passive than a commercial you were forced to watch. With an explainer video, you likely came across the site or video while searching for a way to do something or solve an issue. The viewer already knows they need this and now it’s time to convince them yours is the best.  

They are going to take the time to understand clearly what it is you do and that plays into the quality of the site, your videos and your team.

85% more likely to buy than people who don’t view videos. Even if that number was only 50%, wouldn’t you spend the money on a video? That’s 50% more users that are likely to sign up & buy. 

The more you can educate your consumer on who you are, what you do and why to choose you, the better off you’ll be. 

This past week was a bit crazy… Monday afternoon I told Jake that we needed to finish two videos by the end of day Friday. Both these videos had live action elements that had been shot the week before, we just need to add graphics and do clean up to all the shots. The videos each were roughly 2 minutes in length and required a good amount of compositing. I think if someone told me I had a week to get all this done, I may have laughed in their face. But Jake said ok and asked where to start. With that deadline hanging over our heads, we got to work.

Most of the videos we work on don’t really have a hard deadline, we work on the video till it’s done. Sometimes there are launch days that we’re trying to hit but they usually aren’t too crazy of a turnaround.  I know our abilities and what we can take on and accomplish so we don’t usually find ourselves in a situation where we are freaking out about deadlines. The opened ended deadline or no deadline is great but sometimes if you really want the work to get done you have to set a deadline. That extra push is often just what you need. 

Basically we had two days to work on each video and then Friday for any final tweaks. Yeah, that’s a fast turn around. Just like in school when you have a paper due the next day and you haven’t started it, you let that stress fuel you and you get it done. You have to get it done otherwise you’re going to fail and in this case if we didn’t do well, we wouldn’t get paid but we’d also burn a bridge and disappoint a client. 

Because of that deadline, it forced us to work harder, smarter and well faster. We didn’t have time to screw around; no checking YouTube or getting lost on wikipedia. If After Effects or Cinema 4D wasn’t rendering then we better be animating. You might be surprised to hear there were no sleepless nights either. Typically we worked from 9 am - 1:00 AM which if you know me is my typical work schedule anyway. 

Right now we’re doing some final changes that the clients had but they loved the videos and I’m really happy with the result as well.