First thoughts on real estate video production: Stuff that works

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I took the Bert and Ernie movie to YouTube to see how it would translate. I had read that much of the YouTube quality issue, that awful blocky MPEGulation, was caused by the quality of the source video, and I wanted to put it that notion to the test. Whatever B&EbtUSA lacks in cinematic art, it is decent-quality NTSC video. In other words, if you drove it into your television, it would look like TV-quality video. Bottom line: Not great, not awful. YouTube clearly is imposing its own compression on the source video, resulting in a significant loss of quality. Even so, the results are not nearly as bad as we resign ourselves to accepting from YouTube. My guess is that worst YouTube videos are being scaled up from iPod-sized source videos.

I think it’s funny to make a video about weblogging, so Cathy and I had our revenge yesterday at open house: We made a two-shot talking had video about video. It’s actually deeply philosophical, which is what poor Cathy has to live through when she lets me talk. But I haven’t cut it together yet, so that will have to wait.

Another project is to recut the Almeria video to try to make it a little less visually disquieting.

Recall that the original idea behind that film was to come up with an alternative to the “this… is… the… master… bed… room…” style of real estate video. In the film Cathy and I shot yesterday, we spend some time talking about the Greek idea of historia — the notion that history is not just a chronicle of events but, rather, an interpretive context — a story. I believe that real estate video works when it works as a story and not just as a visual summary of the MLS listing.

As a separate expression of that same kind of idea, BloodhoundBlog contributor Doug Quance brings forth A Study In Staging A Home In Atlanta. The home is shown to full advantage, but, by making the film about the story of the staging of the house, we don’t feel like we’re being sold. My bet is that Cox Cable in Atlanta has one or more channels devoted to real estate clips. They should give Doug free air time for the films he is making.

It’s pots and kettles to bitch about talking-head or two-shot videos, but Inman Blog actually came across with something new: A three-camera video interview with Lockhart Steele of Curbed fame. The interview itself is about what you would expect, but the three-camera technique lends it a visual interest we don’t normally see in these things. The idea dates from the early days of television. You film your event with multiple cameras from different angles. You can edit on the fly, in real time, or in post-production. But because you can vary shots, angles, zooms, etc., you can bring visual variety to an otherwise static scene.

Here’s another way of achieving a similar result with only one camera: The Sixty Minutes Technique. If you have prepared your questions for an interview, you can ask them while filming your subject exclusively with the one camera. Then, after the subject has left, you can film the questions. If you’re very demanding when you ask them the first time and very reasonable the second time, you will have achieved the Mike Wallace effect. In any case, you edit the two clips together in post-production and you have a visually interesting interview sequence. Even better, you can visually break up long answers with illustrative video clips and photographs.

For reasons that we’ll talk about in the film Cathy and I made, video can never take the place of discursive prose. But it’s very good at what it’s good at, so I think it’s worth our while to get good at producing video.

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