I signed up with Animoto and made a couple of videos to promote my business last night. There are a lot of things to like abuot Animoto. It’s easy to use, and nearly completely automatic. You just upload your photos, choose the music, and write in a title and description. You can also choose to create a button that shows up at the end of embedded video to point users to a specific website. There’s a decent selection of music of various genres too. The music is available for use royalty-free, which makes things quite easy. After you’ve made your movie, you can download it in DVD quality. Sweet.

The things I don’t like are that it takes a long time to render a movie (about 15-30 minutes, typically). You also don’t get much choice in which transitions and effects are used to display your photos. It is all automatic, so you kind of get what they give you. If you are not satisfied, you can “remix” the video and it will run through the process again, coming out slightly differently, but that takes another 15-30 minutes.

Anyway, here are my first two movies… more to come later.

This time, the postcard is to advertise my promotional photos. Front and back are below…

I had a good day yesterday. Someone gave me tickets to see the Blue Jays game, so I took Dad with me. It brought back memories of Dad taking the family to see the game. Of course, back then, the Blue Jays actually had a fighting chance of winning. These days, the odds aren’t so good. Although the seats were great–about 20 rows behind home plate–the Jays managed to lose. After the game, we walked up to Chinatown to meet James and Susan for a delicious dinner.

I’ve been thinking about marketing a lot lately. The next step is to get these postcards printed. I’ve finished the first design and sent it off to the printer. These cards advertise headshots, and will be printed on glossy card stock, color on both sides. I’m looking forward to seeing the results.

I had a meeting yesterday with an art director who designs several local magazines. They’re pretty classy magazines, and nicely designed, so I’d love the chance to shoot for them. Anyway, I wanted to leave him with some examples of my work, so I designed this little one-off sell sheet to give to him.

This one is just meant to be very general, so I don’t think it’s too effective on its own, but I think it gives an idea of what kind of commercial work I do. I’m planning to make postcards to advertise headshots, and another one for promo photos for bands and performers.