How are we already half way through the year? This year has gone way too quickly. A lot has happened in our personal lives so far, we got our first home and we also just got a new kitten. We’re saving for renovations – we have a lot of big plans for the house, and we’re paying bills for the first time in a while (thanks Mum and Dad for the last few years). It’s been a rollercoaster, the house buying journey itself is full of highs and lows, add to that some unrelated trauma we had to deal with earlier in the year and over all we’re hoping that the next six months are a lot more chill.
Work has been chugging away quietly, we have been focusing a little more on social media marketing recently and how to better target ads to specific audiences. We both love making content for social media so this is something we would like to branch into. We’re also trying to learn more about different platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram instead of just focusing on Facebook. We’ve also been trying to boost our SEO and learn what works most efficiently. For us this blog actually works well, I made a Facebook post a while ago about how people searching a homemade chloroform recipe have been seeing our website a lot which is way too specific and unrelated but kind of cool… mostly creepy through. The trick is to make sure each blog has the searchable keywords in it like Media Melt, Video Production, Dunedin, Pet Photography, etc. I usually have to be kind of sneaky about it but that was easy this week!
I’ve started at BNI which is a business networking group. We meet at 7am (!?!?!?) on Tuesday and man what a struggle it is to get up! You stand up and talk about whats happening in your business for 60 seconds each week and there’s a roster of people who do a 10-minute slideshow. Luckily, I’m a good 15 weeks away from doing mine! It was scary at first but I’m getting to know everyone a bit better now. You’re encouraged to go to people’s offices and see what they do so we’ve gone for a few visits and had a few visitors in. Everyone loves seeing the Meg videos. Making some new contacts and a few people want videos for themselves too which is great.
We met with the Otago Polytech who have a marketing internship program and after some interviews, decided on a lovely girl who I won’t name because she hasn’t actually started with us yet. Hopefully I can talk her into doing a blog spotlight on herself after she starts so you all can get to know her too – we’ll see haha. She has some great ideas for getting our name out and she will also be working with Book to market Totalmon which is all set to be launched on Kickstarter on the 1st of August!!!! It’s all go!
We’re still mostly doing health and safety videos, with a few new clients signed up. We recently made a Risk Assessment sim and a Monthly Vehicle Check sim. It’s nice to get out of the office and meet some new people. While most people are super camera shy, they still seem to find it all quite interesting and always ask about our equipment. They usually expect us to show up with some huge RED or some shoulder mounted monstrosity but we just use a DSLR, which I think helps a bit with the actor nerves haha. It’s much less intimidating. The clapper is also a pretty big hit, even if they don’t understand what it does, they recognise it and give it a clap.
We’ve done some non-health and safety related work as well, the two most notable jobs being our photoshoot for AA Pet Insurance and our explainer video for Dunedin City Council. Both of these were new things that we hadn’t really done before but we gave it a go and they both turned out fantastic. Our model for AA Pet Insurance was Holly, a Duck Tolling Retriever who is being trained to sniff out native frogs! She was gorgeous and photogenic. We got some pictures in the studio then took her down to the beach for some action shots. That was a fun day, Book and I both had cameras and we just went nuts and took probably 3000 photos. We ended up with about 12 really good ones and AA seemed stoked. The DDC video was interesting because Book had never made a video that was fully just motion graphics, it’s usually motion graphics over live action. They wanted a whiteboard animated feel to it and man, did Book deliver. The final video looks polished and professional, even with me doing the voiceover! It’s going to be a great example of what we can do for new clients too.
I’m not sure what the next half of the year will bring, hopefully a full-time work load! We’re slowly getting more clients, and with our backlog of generic health and safety videos we can hopefully sell them on to companies without having to do much at all. That’s the dream anyway. I guess you guys will find out how we went in our end of year post in December!
Catch you next week,
Eve
Media Melt is a Video Production Company based in Dunedin, New Zealand. If you have any enquires, feel free to contact us here
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