My good friend Adam Schrager asked us to produce a short trailer for his book “The Principled Politician.” Adam was interested in using the trailer to promote the book, and to provide a short synopsis of the story for those of us to lazy to read the back cover. It was a creative and unique marketing strategy for the book industry at the time.

We produced this video for Central Bancorp – a Colorado Springs based company – a couple of years ago. The majority of the production was spent on the first minute of the video. At the time, the company had five main services and the challenge was to communicate that without confusing the audience. We layered the company’s mission statement with the various logos of the services to create the look of the open, and then we inserted soundbites from the executives to effectively relay the organization’s core beliefs.

We were fortunate to work with the Alzheimer’s Association again in 2012. We produced two videos for them in previous years, but this one was our best video yet. We opened the piece by hearing from the people who are directly impacted by the disease – the patients and their caregivers. It is incredible to listen to their stories and to see the courage and compassion in which they walk through this difficult time in their lives.

Chroma-keying is an effective visual effects technique that provides great flexibility to video producers. Closely associated with the weather segment on local news stations, chroma-key compositing gives producers the opportunity to shoot their subjects against a colored background – ordinarily green or blue – then replace the “color” with an image or animation. Using the local news example, weather forecasters are shot against a green screen while presenting their report. People visiting in the studio see the green screen, but viewers at home see a series of maps prepared beforehand by the meteorologist.

I have no intention of boring you with the details of how all of that works. The point of this blog is to introduce Freedom House Productions portable green screen. It is quick to set up and can be utilized in the smallest of spaces. Rather than being confined to shooting interviews against a boring white wall, we can easily set up the green screen and replace the background with anything we want. Corporate clients have appreciated the ability to include their logo behind a spokesperson, while animating critical bullet points to highlight their services.

Green screen technology gives us the freedom to be as creative and out-of-the-box as we want. If you are interested in learning more about our video services or how you might be able to implement green screen technology into your marketing, contact us today.

We continue to invest in equipment that will help differentiate our video service. Our most recent purchase is a portable jib. It is compact enough to work in smaller rooms, while being flexible enough to get shots usually reserved for larger rigs.

Be on the lookout for new Metro State commercials. Working closely with the college, we produced the spots that are currently running on 9News, CBS4, PBS and Spanish television. Each commercial features an alumnus and their impact they have had on our community since graduating from Metro.

We recently worked on a project for The Urology Center of Colorado where we sat down cancer survivors and let them tell their story. The video below is the story of Sandra Frank who was diagnosed with bladder cancer last year.

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Our new toy in the office is an iPad teleprompter. A cool tool that allows us to have teleprompter capabilities no matter where we are. Obviously, this allows us to take clients to locations that were previously off limits and have them give their presentations effectively and accurately. The prompter was easy to install taking me 15 minutes to get it up and running. We are currently using Teleprompter+, an inexpensive app that you can purchase from the iPad AppStore. Just load the app and then place the iPad in the housing. The text is incredibly clear and even shows up in bright sunlight.