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Promotional Video?
I'm on the committee for our annual open house and a few of us thought it would be useful to do a short (2-4 minute) promotional video to just introduce the department and explain a bit about what we do. We'll have it run on a laptop TV during the open house, and maybe put it on our web site after.
We plan to just stick to the basics -- it's surprising what people don't know about their local departments. For example: a lot of people don't know we're an all-volunteer department, and if their house catches fire or they have a medical emergency, it's their neighbors who will show up to help. We figure we really must not be getting our message out adequately if so many people don't know this stuff, so this will just be one more way to get the message across. We have the good fortune that one of our other volunteers is a professional cameraman and video producer, so we've got some skills to draw on (not mine!)
Has anybody out there done this before for their departments? If you've done this with your department, how did it work out? Any tips?
We plan to just stick to the basics -- it's surprising what people don't know about their local departments. For example: a lot of people don't know we're an all-volunteer department, and if their house catches fire or they have a medical emergency, it's their neighbors who will show up to help. We figure we really must not be getting our message out adequately if so many people don't know this stuff, so this will just be one more way to get the message across. We have the good fortune that one of our other volunteers is a professional cameraman and video producer, so we've got some skills to draw on (not mine!)
Has anybody out there done this before for their departments? If you've done this with your department, how did it work out? Any tips?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Kyle Pomeroy on
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I Made a video for my dept. last year both for the members to look back on years past and for residents to understand what, and how much, we do. It worked GREAT!!! you wouldnt believe how tuned in to videos people are and the responses i got from it! since then, the residents and firefighters have urged us to create videos almost monthly! it really has worked a ton for public relations in our district, i cannot suggest this enough!
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Permalink Reply by KClark903 on
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I agree with Kyle it is a great tool to use. We did a couple for our department we used shots from the past year to make it. It is also a way to keep your history of the firehouse go for man and check some of the videos out on here there are some good ones
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Permalink Reply by Dan Hoey on
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We did with a great sound track a few years ago and its great tool during fund drive and if you go and ask you local movie house they may allow it to be shown before shows for free, we got 2 weeks on the big screen and it was just 2 minutes of the video and our fund drive went up 50% as well as gaining a few members. Also years later its great to have to see you younger and guys you may have lost on the way
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Permalink Reply by Tom Arnold on
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Kyle, Klark, Dan - thanks for the replies. I would never have thought about some of these things. Our district is so small it doesn't even encompass a movie house but that's a great idea.
Follow up question: how many minutes do your videos run? We're currently planning to do something really short ( to match our modern attention spans) like 2-3 minutes, but what did you do and how happy were you with the length?
It also seems like these videos might be good to post on the video section of this site. If anybody wants to do that I'd like to check them out.
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We have done quite a few, they have ranged from 2-3 mins to up to 6, i would suggest start off small, especially if you dont have much content to put in it, i dont know if you have a program to make this movie you were going to use but i suggest windows movie maker, it comes with most windows programmed computers or i think you can download it for free, if you havent used it before, make a few "rough draft" videos just to get use to the ins and outs of the program
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Permalink Reply by Engineco913 on
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What our fire company did was combine action photo's with small excerpt of the firehouse, apparatus and members. The key is to associate the personal side of the firefighters lives with the ever presant tone lurking on the horizen. I know it seems a monumental task, but we achieved it through some creative video work. If you can show some members with their families kissing their wife goodbye after a tone (which you can get a dl from dispatch of) and going to the firehouse. Combined with some action shots that show what we do on a daily basis, and you have tied the personal touch of being a volunteer firefighter with the prefessional aura of what we are all trained to accomplish. I hope this helps. (bring the videos to fire prevention week. Our video is all tuned in with music in the background and was available for sale at the open house as well on DVD)
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Kyle,
I've used windows movie maker and also Roxio Easy Media Creator on Windows. For this project we have the good luck that one of our firefighters is a video pro and has a Mac with Adobe Premier. We'll probably use that. If it were up to me I think I'd use iMovie and iDVD on the Mac because I find them pretty intuitive. I sort of struggled with the Easy Media Creator, though it can do a lot once you get the hang of it.
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Yes, we were thinking about the "responding to a tone" segment. Though in my case, the "kiss the wife goodbye" is more like one of us yelling "we got a call! I'm going. You going?" She's a driver-operator and we sometimes both go.
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