Comedy Festivals and Promo Videos

One of the biggest things I learned from the Melbourne Comedy Festival was how a promo video can be a great marketing tool, and how quickly you can put one together if you really try.

Two weeks into the month-long festival, we noticed that ticket sales were tapering off a little. We needed something to help with promoting the show. YC had been collecting video clips of audience testimonials about the show, so we decided to put them to good use.

Over two straight days and about a thousand cups of coffee, we hit the editing suite. Since we were working mainly at the venue, the only editing option we had was a copy of iMovie running on a MacBook Air. All my previous editing experience was in Adobe Premiere, and I wasn't at all enthused about trying to work with beginner software on a low power machine.

As it turns out, iMovie '11 is actually a pretty impressive piece of software. It has it's share of issues (just try duplicating a title...), but was good enough to let us crank out the following finished piece.

The video went online only 36 hours after we began work on it. It immediately started getting a good response on Facebook and Twitter, and led to what looked like a decent spike in ticket sales.

Next time I just want to make sure we have some customised music. I'm not sure how much street cred you lose for using iMovie's default soundtrack, but I imagine it's a lot.

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