The Melmarc Zone, a new kind of corporate video

I occasionally crew for my friend Phil Hover at Soar Productions who does corporate videos in Orange County. More than half of the projects he hires me on end up being slightly zany takes on the traditionally dry corporate video genre that involve the company's actual employees as amatuer actors. It's a really unique experience, and I love it every time. This time, he covered an Orange County textile company called Melmarc in a mashup of styles that combined The Office, reality TV, and the Twilight Zone.

I'm always impressed how excited and involved the employees get. This is the second corporate video of this type that I've done with him, and each time I'm surprised how dedicated the employees are to learning a skillset completely divorced from their own industries to help get the movie made. Watch especially Blaze's crazy designer pad, a set that the employees put together entirely on their own, to see how much these guys really throw themselves into the production. And Blaze himself clearly missed his calling.

I also have to praise Melmarc for being self-confident enough to do something totally off-beat and put it out there with no shame. Most companies do not have the cajones to do something like that, but I really think a video like this sets Melmarc apart from other companies, especially in attracting an edgier crowd.

Thanks to Phil for giving me the amazing opportunity of watching him work again, and I hope you enjoy "The Melmarc Zone."

The great backlight adventure

About six months ago, the back light on my friend's five-year old Dell Latitude expired. Eschewing traditional repair routes, and despite having many technically-inclined friends more than capable of taking on the task of repairing the laptop for him, my friend Justin — who is anything but technically inclined — purchased a replacement part from eBay and set about replacing the fizzled filament himself.

In a rather spur of the moment decision, we decided to film the event, and it snowballed into a full-blown pick up production. Justin invited everyone over for a party. We threw together an interview station with a curtain and a work light and interviewed all the attendees on their opinions on Justin's prospects for success. Following that, we filmed the entire repair process from the first unhinged screw to the decisive moment when Justin steeled himself and with eyes pressed shut in terror finally pushed the power button.

Another friend of mine is editing the project, but I threw together a little trailer after capturing the footage. I hope you enjoy it, and stay tuned for a full documentary on the event sometime in the future.

Justin's Laptop Teaser from Matt Agnello on Vimeo.

PLoS Conversations: Episode One

I've been doing some more work with PLoS, the open access science journal, to help grow their community and spread their amazing ideas around. The latest to come out of the amazing idea machine that lives in the depths of PLoS is article-level metrics, a new way of evaluating paper relevance and impact. This was the first of what will hopefully be several episodes in a series we've decided to call PLoS Conversations where PLoS collaborates with people in the community to talk about hot topics in open access generally and PLoS specifically, and I help make a video out of it.

This was my first project where I worked as the editor only and someone else shot the footage. That someone else was Cameron Neylon, a biological scientist and social media blogger, who used ScreenFlow to record himself and his Mac while he presented on article-level metrics and social bookmarking for academics.

Check back at the PLoS Conversations channel for future updates. We'll hopefully be adding more videos there in the future. Enjoy!

Article-level Metrics from PLoS on Vimeo.

Speak early and often

This is my hundredth post! The irony is that it comes over 100 days since I did my 99th.

I have to apologize for not posting for so long. I can't offer being busy as a reason, or having nothing to post about. Neither is true. It was more a confidence issue.

Reading more and more about the history of blogging and watching social media develop as a medium, I found it hard to believe that I could really add much that hadn't been touched on already by better minds. But this view, I later discovered (or re-discovered), is completely wrong. I reaffirmed for myself something I had known intuitively for a long time but faded when I never asserted it: everyone's perspective matters.

One might not be a master wordsmith or know the perfect metaphor for the moment, but the Web invites even the dustiest prose, and the most amateur author, to speak. The act alone is important, because you can't evaluate beforehand the impact of your words. You have to form them and put them firmly into the world first to really know their worth. And even if your work is not deemed worthy, it's a step toward getting your 10,000 hours in and learning the craft.

I wrote about Ira Glass's comments on storytelling and creativity a while ago, and it came back to me as I thought about this topic. He talks about how people in creative fields start out with great taste but little skill. It takes a while, a long while, for those two things to converge, where you can make something that really matches the image you have in your mind. What he doesn't come out and say is this: perfectionism and fear of failure will make you fail. You have to try and fail over and over again, and rarely will you be rewarded for the act of trying, but it is by far the most important thing you can do to increase your ability to "be the change you wish to see in the world "(Ghandi).

My perfectionism and fear of failure kept me silent since March. I hope not to succumb to that again. To make it up, I have some posts coming up after this one to talk a bit about what I've been doing in the last few months, and I hope you enjoy them.

Update: Here are some direct links to the three new blog posts.

• PLoS Conversations: Episode One
• The great backlight adventure
• The Melmarc Zone, a new kind of corporate video