Outdoor Light

Indoor Light

Foreground

Background

Rule Of Thirds

Lead Room

I actually enjoy photography a lot so this project was pretty fun for me.

The first picture I went out in the snow and took a picture of this abandoned potato cellar. Because it was snowy and overcast it made the light real even. You can even see some snow blowing in front of the camera, which I thought turned out well.

For the next three pictures I used a bed sheet and set up a small studio in a hallway in my house I used a daylight balanced LED light in a consumer lamp, and defused the light with a plastic soft cover. I thought this picture of the wagon turned out well. I used the same setup to get the pictures of the two guitar amps and switched focus from the foreground to the background.

The next picture I took of my son in our dining room. It was still light outside and I used the light from the window. I placed his face directly on the left third and I placed the top of the white paneling on the top third to create this image.

For the last picture I went outside again and took this picture of a Cat. I was able to get the cat to look away from me and add lead room to the left.

I imported all of these images into light room and did some exposure correction and cropping. I then exported the images with a watermark.

This week I want to talk about my experience working with Deep Love and the PR success’s and failures I’ve seen with them. I started working with Deep Love in 2013 when some of my students recorded one of there shows and I helped them put it together into a CD. I saw raw potential in the show but didn’t ever think it would last. I also recognized that there was a lot of talent in the show but it seemed like they were too disorganized to really make anything happen.

Fast forward to 2015 and I was heavily involved in bringing the show to the New York Musical Theater Festival. We played 5 shows in a theater just off broadway, and it was a crazy experience. Deep Love doesn’t have a hired PR team. The three people that run the show just kind of do it themselves. What’s interesting is that they are pretty good at it. When they got to New York they hired big time people to stage manage and direct the show. They got a performance on Fox And Friends and got a feature in the Associated Press that was featured in big papers including the New York Times.

The run in New York was pretty successful, and they have done a great job of riding the publicity they got there into this year. They used a quote from the New York Times review to promote the show this year, and had a pretty great social media campaign. They have also gotten a lot better at event planing and manage to nearly sell out there Idaho Falls show and sold out there show in Salt Lake City. It’s been fun to be a close witness to the growth of this show and this semester to analyze what they are doing right when it comes to PR.

I know I talked about this in class today, but I wanted to elaborate some more on why I think the way Nintendo handled the announcement of it’s new system today, was totally brilliant. Nintendo has traditionally been very blah when it comes to announcing new hardware and games. They famously hired Reggie Fils-Aime in 2004 who’s previous work included VH1 and Pizza Hut. He brought a very conservative and corporate culture to nintendo that proved to be very successful during the era when nintendo released the original Wii. Unfortunately this was not a sustainable culture and the casual gamers Nintendo attracted at that time were uninterested with their latest product, the Wii U. Nintendo has been firmly in third place this current generation and has not attracted any real 3rd party support. They are still super successful with their mobile platform, the 3DS, which makes their announcement today even more brilliant.

I’m really impressed with what Nintendo did today. The first reason why is because they flipped the script on how hardware is launched and instead of holding a huge press conference with lots of fanfare, they quietly released a really well done 3 minute sizzle reel and let the internet do their PR for them. I have been paying a lot of attention to social media and blogs today, and this strategy has really seemed to work for them. They owned the Video Game blog world today, and I even saw some main stream media articles talking about the new system. I think this strategy was very calculated and brilliant.

The other reason why I’m impressed with what Nintendo is doing is they are taking the successful side of their business, mobile, and combining it with their struggling side, traditional game consoles. By creating one product that can be used as a mobile device, and docked to a TV is brilliant. What’s brilliant about it from a PR perspective is that Nintendo has traditionally been marketed to parents with children. The video they released to day was clearly marketed to millennials. Nintendo has clearly realized that millennials have grew up playing their portable systems, and having a Wii in the home. By combining both of these products, and doing it well, I think this system will sell really well.

I mentioned in class it was going to be interesting to see how Interscope decides to handle PR for the new Lady Gaga album because they basically bet the farm on her last record and lost tons of money. This last week the NFL announced that Lady Gaga will be performing at the Superbowl this year. This is obviously a huge deal for Gaga and Interscope but there are some interesting observations to be made with their PR strategy.

The most interesting thing is that other than very basic promotion, and announcing the Superbowl performance, there hasn’t been a whole lot of PR happening. This is very interesting because Gaga’s new album comes out Oct 21st, which is really soon. It seems like Interscope is adopting a new strategy with how to promote Gaga, and they are laying back a little bit this time. During the PR cycle on Gaga’s last album there was a huge budget and a large ground swell that led to average sales. This time around they appear to be taking on a new strategy.

My opinion is that this is a brilliant strategy. Gaga’s biggest strength is her ability to perform. Putting her in the Superbowl halftime show and I imagine having her start to make the rounds of morning and late night shows over the next couple weeks could be brilliant. It allows the public to see her strong side and I imagine she will get some good PR because of it. What will be really interesting to see is if it leads to an increase in album sales.

I was able to spend some time today and polish up my rough cut! I changed the edit around significantly and added b-roll. I think it’s pretty close. I’m waiting for some more feedback from my colleagues and the other students in class and I’ll finish things up next Saturday. Here is the link to my new cut!

Living With Lupus Rough 7-2