Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Tim and Tim Talk. Tim you're here, how are you? Hey, I'm doing great. You know Tim, it's been award show season lately and there's been a lot of hubbub about the award shows the Oscars just happened. You watched it. I am a bad production person and missed the Oscars. What did I miss? Well Tim, the reason I watch it is because I secretly you know, desire to be on that stage someday with the trophy making best accolades for director or maybe actor Tim. How is my acting? Tim and Tim Talk did not get nominated this year. We got snubbed. I don't know. I don't know how we lost that one. But where's the recount? Can we trigger? Like the recount? Did ballots get stuff going? There's something to this Tim. I think it was hanging chads. Yeah, we definitely did. But this Oscars, though, you know Tim. I think that the way to summarize what happened with this Oscars is just breaking the rules. This Oscar season, they broke tons of rules. So much so, Tim that you know- my professors... if I broke one of these rules back in the day when I was in college, I would have gotten a failing grade. Aren't these like film professionals? What are they doing here Tim? Right? That exactly what are they doing? And what am I talking about? So let's talk about this. Here's a shot right here that you can see next to me. And if you notice how low they are. Well, let's take that back a step actually Tim. And so let's talk about what was proper framing proper framing is like how you and I are right now, right. We just have a little bit of head room above us and we have we're centered into the camera, right? But what are the Oscars doing? They're down here. They're down. They're like this join me, would you? Yeah, like that! That doesn't feel as comfortable. I mean it is comfortable, I think I'll stay like that. You know, you have a better chair than me. You have higher production value over there, I think. Never. It's it's basically breaking the rules of the thirds, right? So why are they doing that Tim? They must have a reason right? This is the Oscars- it's not an accident. What happened? That would be amazing. If it was an accident, right? They just randomly like a camera guy just totally you know, chucked the rulebook out and said nah, I'm a freelancer. I'm gonna shoot it my way. You're right Tim. They they broke the rules and you know why they broke the rules and you and I should get credit for this because another famous Tim. Influenced it. A Tim, not one of us one of us? Not one of us! But this Tim has an open invitation to join us basically at any time right just the show. It's Mr. Tim Cook from Apple the CEO of Apple, but really this actually goes back even before Tim Cook to Steve Jobs. Now if you take a look at here, you can see an Apple keynote and Tim. Do you notice do you notice the similarities? That framing right the framing with the the talent in the corner and and we're like looking up at the backdrop. What's what's that about? Right? So there's two different ways to essentially communicate your content and also the person delivering it. Now, you always want to have a human being or who knows what that's gonna be in the future with AI or just like- Siri's going to deliver the keynotes. Exactly a human-like being would probably be good enough these days. But you you really want that because that's- Us as humans, we connect emotionally to that person. You want to see the reaction you want to see how they get excited. You want to see where they're looking to you we connect that that's you know tens of thousands of years of evolution. So we need to have that component in there but not right. You also have a keynote that you're also delivering you want to get across an important message. So there's the two ways right? There's the ways that you know, you and I are showing it we've elected you to do this because Tim our budget not yet there. For a big giant LED wall. Unfortunately, Tim and Tim Talk does not have an Oscars or an Apple keynote budget. But if Apple would like to have us deliver Tim and Tim Talk from the Apple stage. We would love we'd love to come by. We'll check our calendars. We'll check our iCalendars availability to it. It's too funny. So yeah, we don't have that but Apple does and The Oscars do and so- They've got that LED wall. Right? So there- are you saying they're there they're framing the LED wall to put the content behind in the frame instead of doing a picture-in-picture. They're they're shooting the content in camera. Correct. You know with a very dramatic shot which which gives the content the actual slides or motion graphic content, you know, the the preferred placement in the camera shot and the person kind of fills in the corner interesting. Yeah. It is interesting and Tim. This was not always an easy task to do, you know without going too much into the weeds. I mean, I guess we are technical show. So this is actually the place to go into the weeds. We'll save that for another episode but you need to start thinking of pixel pitch, you need to start taking consideration into are you gonna be getting blurs? You're shooting the camera against an LED wall is not easy and I can only imagine how long the Oscars and the video production team for the Oscars took, you know to get that out to get those kinks out of the system totally and shout out to my friend Dusty who is one of the video engineers- the video wall engineers on the Oscars whose job was to make make that work. You Tim your network never ceases to evase me that Rolodex that you have it is just it's it's deep. You know, whether we go here where they're going to New York whether we're going to Europe. You know, it's something about us Tims, Tim. We just we just network. We know we make sure we know people all over- it comes in handy once in a while to know later around, you know. It really does and and if your friend wants to to come in and give a first-hand account of what took place. We'd love to to host him and have them or or anybody for that matter. That was a part of the production would love the insight- we're speculating to this is what we do best. Right? Right. We weren't there sadly right again. Unfortunately, we were not we were neither backstage nor in the front row at the Oscars, you know, missed my invitation must have got lost in the mail, but- Yours and mine both, you know. Mr. and Mrs. Oscars, please fix that for next year, but thank you to the Academy in advance. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Okay, we have digressed. So going back to the LED wall. Absolutely. But Tim, there's another secret that this setup requires similar to Apple and similar to the Oscar is you cannot have the camera too far back. So there is a form whenever you zoom in with the camera. What you notice in is the background becomes condensed and it becomes tighter and smaller. So when you're wide essentially your background maybe would be this wide. As the camera zooms in, the background becomes tighter and tighter so I think it's because the lens like how lenses work Tim is that- That is correct. Yeah. And that is well above my engineering my lack of engineering degree to explain how and why I just actually know it exists Right, right, right. And so the the way that you overcome that right is by bringing the camera. And so this is actually fascinating as well is you'll notice they brought the camera basically all the way to the front of the stage. They and this is something that our clients Tim now taking this to corporate and traditional A/V, they're afraid to put the camera too close because they're worried about the audience but really where is your audience? Right? And this technology is amazing. This is just a vertical telescoping, you know, tripod and camera system. I say just- like, I mean, I'm sure it's a hundred thousand dollar camera system not including the camera. That's just the rigging system part of it, but it gives you such an interesting angle and it allows you to execute this vision. Now if we were to get called and say mimicking that look we would find different ways that didn't require as expensive of a budget as that, but this is basically the top tier way to deliver this look because you have to have that camera close I would say it's probably within 10 feet. I mean you you can see the picture here like, you know, we do a lot of events with cameras sort of in the the orchestra pit at the theater but we don't typically raise them up above the line of the stage and so it's really interesting about you know, in this you know global stage at the Oscars. They're putting the camera in front of the audience. And so thinking about you know with our clients, you know again, where is your audience? Is your audience primarily in the room or primarily inside that TV camera and certainly for the Oscars, right? You know, everyone in the room is in entertainment and cinema so they know that the show is catering to the camera as much as to them and I think for our clients and for our audience here think about your production, right how much of your audience is in the room versus how much is going to be in the remote broadcast? And how are you catering to both audiences? And and how are you in some ways reminding the in-person audience that there is also a remote audience and including them in the show? And I think you know stopping pretending that you know, there's not a remote audience if we just you know, put the camera front and center we don't have to pretend there's not a camera there. We say look there's a camera here. We have two audiences, you know, you can look down the barrel of the lens as some of the acceptance speech just did where they were looking right at the camera and you can look you know cast your eyes across the room but thinking about reminding your speakers, right? You know look at the camera once in a while, break the fourth wall. Remember that, you know as much as you're looking the audience member in the front row in the eye look the camera in the eye because that's your web audience. Oh, absolutely and you know, it's just it's just fascinating. They really took a chance they decided to put the camera right up there. So, you know kudos for the Oscars for for really changing and switching gears this year for doing that and showing that it is possible. Right? Like I feel once a company like Apple or you know organization like the Oscars does it it kind of gives justification for the rest of us to do that and to also have my college professor back in the day change my grade see I was ahead of the curve. So, you know speaking of you know lessons learned that you know things we've been talking about and that we've been talking about colleagues about in virtual events. What are some other kind of you know lessons that the Oscars have have shown us about this kind of hybrid event model that things that we can take away and our clients can take away? Yeah, absolutely. So Tim. They really got a lot of pushback last year for probably I think it was around eight I would say of the 24 segments got cut from air. They got cut from air and that's really not in the spirit of what the Oscars are, right? So what they learned and what was really impressive this year was they added QR codes. They- Tim pardon my pun on this one. They kept the conversation going. Oh. But have you heard that one before? Let's keep the conversation going. Love it. I love it. But we talk about you know in the hybrid and virtual event space, you know that, you know, it's so important to condense your content right that audiences have shorter attention spans online but also in person frankly, right your in person audiences don't necessarily want to sit in the ballroom or the theater for eight hours straight, right? They need to get out, they want to network they're there at your event not just to see what's on stage. They're there to mix and mingle and so how do you make sure that you're delivering the message that you need your audience to hear but also giving them their time of day back and one of the ways to do that as we're seeing is take some of that content out of the program and give it back to the audiences as second screen content or on-demand content or content that they can access on their own time for the stuff they're interested in. When they want to dive deeper, right? They can watch the episode of Tim and Tim Talk about that or they can scan the QR code and you know see the background about those nominees. And you know, it's it's not necessarily take the content out. Right? It's maybe truncate the content because what they manage to do by putting these eight segments back in Tim that they took out last year. They had roughly the same running time, you know that so they got to say more they had more messaging but they just didn't go as deep and then absolutely right Tim you're gonna want to really know about the audio and what's going on there. So you're probably scanning the QR code or you know those segments and when it comes to directors of photography like I would really want to be interested more on that. And so that's where I get to go deeper, but we all have, you know, a specific niche and really that's what the internet is about is servicing specific niches and showing that these options are there and maybe that's a good formula for these general for excuse me- for these hybrid events and these virtual events that we're doing. It's- think of it like as a showcase, you know. And we've seen that, Tim, with corporate events where clients want their audience to be able to really get detailed view of the slides or get additional handout content and they'll put a QR code on the screen in the room as well as on the broadcast the audience can scan and you know download the the deck as a PDF or get a handout with additional information or you know, obviously polling or things like that where we're having people who are in the room they're already on their phones texting their friends or checking email have them get that out, use that, both the online audience and your in-person audience can use that second screen to get more content to dive deep to get detailed view and and really it takes advantage of all those devices we have in our pockets instead of you know, making everybody feel bad for having it on the table. Tim are you saying that basically the Oscars are an interactive show? Where have we heard that before? Oh are we having you know, yeah, I mean, yeah- Just like us, that's what we're doing! Right? Right and I think it's really interesting to think about, you know, I've heard, you know many articles talking about this year's Oscars and I'm bummed that I missed it because this year's Oscars I'm hearing is you know was the best in a long time really stepped up the game corrected a lot of the things that people didn't like last year. And so it's really interesting to see that the same things that are working for our client's events, for corporate events, for- for conferences, are the same kinds of things that improve engagement improve audience experience in one of the you know, biggest television productions of the year. Absolutely like take a chance, you know, you can be rewarded for taking a chance. It doesn't have to be drastic. Like I don't think anything was extreme, but they took a chance and they're getting good feedback from that and hey if it wasn't perfect, you know, some of these things can be tightened up and moved around but you now have a stepping stone of where to go and where to correct it. Which kind of leads us to the next point that we have Tim and my final point of what really the Oscars did differently. So the Oscars for the longest time always sort of saw themselves, you know, no disrespect here, but they were the organization on the top of the of the ivory mountain right you would aspire and you would come to them. They did not need to do anything to be able to grow their their content and grow their audience. As we've been seeing with the ratings. Unfortunately have been going down and down they are now how do we say this? They're they're proactively trying to fix that and one of the ways that they're trying to do that is near social real- excuse me, near real time clips of their of their broadcast. So, you know, this means, you know going to I think it was Tiktok was one of the platforms Tim and Facebook was another one that they basically as soon as it ended they put it on there and this is actually a strong corporate strategy as well. So one of our companies, Google, that we've worked with for many years, you know shout out to them. They were instrumental. They were one of the first companies that we as Argus. We did the same strategy for them like back in 2015-2016. They wanted just clips of the keynote. They want to clips of these talks and they had an editor on site and Tim here's the secret. It's not hard with everything being digital. It's not a big lift to ask. It's not a 48 hour to 72 hour turnaround. And their solutions that would let you clip those in real time. So this the soonest that not just the program ends. But as soon as the segment ends, right you can clip that segment of your CEOs keynote or a particular acceptance speech and turn that around on on Twitter, Tiktok or Instagram reels before the program is even finished airing and and I saw that with with the Oscars right? I wasn't watching the Oscars, but I was at an unrelated, you know party and I was getting messages right or like, you know notifications in my phone on social media seeing, you know, clips on Instagram and Twitter of exactly just that had just air they had just finished and I think that's a lesson that we can say, you know to our audiences too is even if you have an internal event, right, even if it's not actual face to face content, it's not content that you want, you know to publish on public social media. Maybe you have an internal marketing or sales kick off event or a training event. But your CEO or CFO is speaking. What if you took you know, that that take it home message of that keynote and immediately clip it and posted it to the slack channel so, you know you have audiences in person who are about to go to break and the second the session ends they get a notification on Slack, here's that recap of what we were talking about, the message we're trying to take. Or your virtual audience, right, who's watching at home, right immediately gets to see that you know that clip of that take home message. So, you know when they get up to to get a cup of coffee or or you know, you know mingle in the branch office, or however you're structuring your event, you know, they've already got that, you know messaging. This is the moment that you know solidifies the point and so that's yeah. That's a great idea Tim, it's like it doesn't have to be just to YouTube and Twitter and external tools you could use this internally as well. I like that. I really like that and one of the other things with- and actually, you know, I used to offer this to to clients and pretty much none of them took me up on it. So I actually just stopped offering it but I would offer clipping of videos of their keynote and get it out to Twitter like while the CEO is still on stage and you know, they I think the assumption is they're thinking everybody that's watching is already watching and why post it there but they just don't- I feel like so many clients don't realize that the power of- this is assuming it's a public facing event, you know is the power of putting"Live now our CEO just delivered this message," or "Live now," you know, and then you post a link now you're driving people to your content and to your program. It's a giant ecosystem. There's no such thing as just you know, one platform does it all four wall, lock the doors, unless it's secretive unless you're trying to make even if you're trying to make money from it, actually then this content this strategy we're talking about would work but really embrace, you know, your biggest audience is I want to say blasted out everywhere but really know where your audience is and blast it to that ecosystem. While it's happening. Totally and this is something not necessarily while it's happening but that we're doing with our our program is, you know, taking your content, clipping into shorter clips, and then using that over the course of the year, right? So you have an event that's once a year or you know every quarter, but if you can take that content and make it trickle out during the rest of the year, you're getting value out of that event that you had one time in person. You're getting continual value in brand awareness out of that keynote event out of that CEO speaker or that guest speaker that you paid a lot of money for right? How are you continuing to to get value and brand recognition for that content and in a certainly, you know, if you if it's public and you have permission from the speaker to share it being able to use that content throughout the year recycle it you know and have it drive content or drive recognition of your next event. Right? Think about how close you know, as you get closer to, you know, your this year's event how showing video highlights from last year's event could help drive ticket sales, right? So those are all ways that and we're using you know, social clips to reach audiences that maybe aren't watching the whole podcast or aren't watching, you know, the whole video on YouTube, you know and getting you know, just that pithy message, you know, I think that works in in the event ecosystem just like it works for us and it works really Oscars. We're not just saying this Tim. I mean we're we're doing what we're preaching and we're giving away what we're doing and our strategy to grow the our channel, to give away tools to event producers to technical directors regardless of what side you are on the event, right? These are just important messages to be had and these are this is exactly what we're doing, and proof's in the pudding. This is what Apple's doing. And now this is what the Oscars are doing. And you know, I mean with that to summarize that this point, did you have one more thing to say Tim? No, we're good. Go ahead. Cool- is that you know people- It's no it's it's no longer the Oscars show that your mom and dad used to watch Tim. Or my mom and dad right? You don't have to sit there and watch the whole thing to be part of the conversation. So and I think acknowledging that, meet your audience where they are, not where you want them to be. That's a big difference- where they are, and doing it in near real time really embraces the future that we're going towards, case in point the Oscars of 2023. Totally, totally. Any other highlights from the Oscars Tim? Well, Tim, I would just- I did not realize this but you know, apparently if you get low on crew members... You can turn your talent into audio guys. This is a fun clip. Look at this. That's so funny. That's so funny. You know, I always love it when we get a shout out particularly, you know, yeah for particularly recognizable folks, you know to to step into tech roles and we get to see, you know, see them playing these behind the scenes roles. I think it's always fun to see ourselves reflected on stage as much as backstage. It was definitely fun. And I really like the inside joke that Jimmy Kimmel said at that he was like, Can I please have quiet I need 30 seconds of room tone." And I mean for those that don't need that excuse me- for those that don't know what room tone is, essentially you're creating a baseline of audio that you're then gonna put into your edits when you're doing camera cuts because audio can be jumpy if you don't have the sound of the room and believe it or not every room sounds different. I don't want to go too much into the details. Yeah, that's for a whole other show. Yeah, but Tim, I will say 30 seconds. I usually record a minute. I'm just saying, you know, Jimmy maybe should watch a little- maybe he should watch some of our show. Should be a minute. Well I'm sure- that's a great great joke and I love that, you know, it's it's the crowd of the Oscars, right? Obviously they all get it because they're all on set and I think it's fun to have- They're all industry players. To see to see the behind the scenes reflected, you know on the show. It's always really fun. So well Tim, it's- I mean my speaking of I'm sorry to interrupt you up because that's apparently my specialty on the show interrupting Tim, but you know sharing the clips, you know, getting those out there, you know we would love it for the audience to find us and I mean where can they find us? Are these links below Tim? Yeah. We got some social links below. We got a bunch of different social presences. We're you know working on keeping active on all of them and you can reach us by email. If you have questions if you have you know comments if you have fan mail, hopefully not too much hate mail, but you can reach us at Tims, T-I-M-S at Tim and Tim Talk dot com and certainly if you have questions. If you'd like to join us in the program- if Dusty wants to come on and talk about the LED wall at the Oscars or any of you want to talk about programs or projects you've been a part of, reach out to us and either social media, the comments on YouTube, or- Comments are great. We really like them and and with that. Yeah, if you feel like, you know, you would like some of our expertise and potentially, you know, one of your productions and you know getting execution with these ideas. It'll be a pleasure and it'll be a lot of fun together with you and collaborate. Well Tim, with that, can we get this right this time? We're gonna nail this and I'm Tim and we talked. -we talked! Nailed it!