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How to Find a Film Crew

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Are you struggling with how to find a film crew for your next project? Finding a film crew can be challenging but hiring Maslow Media Group to build your crew makes it easy! There are many benefits to hiring a production crew, and with Maslow Media Group’s expertise, your vision will come to fruition.

A production crew is a group of people who work on a film, television show, commercial, or other production. The staff is responsible for various tasks, including set design , lighting, sound, and camera operation .

The size of a production crew depends on the scope of the project.

Film crew members typically have specific roles and responsibilities. The director is in charge of the overall vision for the project, while the producer manages the logistics and finances. The art department is responsible for the production look, and the grip department handles all equipment.

There are a lot of benefits to hiring a production company. First, they can save you time and money by handling all the production logistics. If the client doesn’t have a physical location or local resources for production, it saves them the money they would have to spend on shipping equipment or travel time for their staff. They can also provide expert advice on everything from set design to lighting to camera operation.

Most importantly, production companies can help turn your dream into a reality. They have the experience and expertise to make any project come to life. Whether it’s a commercial, a music video, a feature film, or a live stream, a good production company will help make it happen.

Without a production crew, a film or television show would not be able to get off the ground. They are an essential part of the filmmaking process, and their work is vital to the success of any project. They will make sure that everything runs smoothly so that you can focus on making your film or television show the best it can be. Hiring a production crew is an investment that will pay off in the end, and you will be glad you made it.

When you’re ready to find a film crew, contact Maslow Media Group, and we will curate the most experienced crew that will meet all your needs!

Maslow Media Group has been setting the standard for video production crewing and staffing for over thirty years as production technology is ever-changing. Maslow Media Group’s in-house product managers use an internal database of over 10,000 pre-qualified video industry professionals to bring your dream to life from pre-production to post-production.

When the client comes to Maslow Media Group with a vision, we execute the project with the highest quality and potential. We take the overwhelming worry off the client’s hands and research the most experienced field crews. Whether your project needs a script to screen, an insert studio in London, or a 4k camera crew in Shanghai, Maslow Media Group has the worldwide resources to build your crew for today or the future.

Before the production can begin, Maslow Media Group collaborates with the client by reviewing their requirements, providing estimates for those requests, and discussing with our directors, producers, animators, and editors. Once that’s squared away, and everything is agreed upon, we can go into production! In this phase, we use expert equipment to capture your footage, edit it, stream it, or transmit it live per your request. In post-production, we gather all the final elements to create your deliverable.

Hiring a production crew could be the answer to making your vision a reality. That’s why you need to hire Maslow Media Group for your next project! We will use our expertise and experience to take the stress off your plate and save you time. Call us today at 202-965-1100 or
visit our website and complete our contact form to get started with us!

The post How to Find a Film Crew appeared first on Maslow Media.

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If You Hire a Contingent Workforce, Security MUST be a Top Priority

CMMA Blog

Ransomware attacks have caused supply chain disruptions , compromised medical care , and even canceled flights . The issue simply isn’t going away. Most of us have added two-step verification to everything from our NestCam s to our grocery chain apps and taken increased steps in our own personal security. This is a good start, but businesses that have access to workers’ Personally Identifiable Information (PII) have extra responsibility. A mistake that compromises your own personal data is certainly an inconvenience, but if you fail when you’re handling other people’s data, it can be a crisis.

If you handle other people’s info, you simply must have solid measures in place so those trusting you with their data know they are in good hands. Ideally, they will never have to think about it. If they do, it likely means you’ve already messed up and you might even be in the headlines.

Security is Everything 

Can you think of many business functions in the world that access more priceless personal information and sensitive company information than hiring? The best systems, software, and teams mean little if they are vulnerable to security attacks. You’ll never make headlines for all your measures preventing an attack, but you’ll certainly make headlines the moment your efforts fail.

When you’re working on a big project and hiring enough workers to get the job done, the last thing you want to be burdened with is integrating all the systems to make sure you get it done securely. Building the infrastructure to hire and deploy a contingent workforce takes time and serious expertise!

How Do You Prevent a Security Breach And Stay Out of The News? 

The most secure organizations partner with and employ several internal and third-party resources to protect PPI as fiercely as possible.

At a minimum, we recommend you: 

• Encrypt everything at multiple levels
• Treat all sensitive information as Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and in accordance with HIPAA recommendations
• Keep sensitive data from going offshore
• Have third parties perform monthly security checks and an annual penetration test

What CEO Todd Keener Has to Say About Security

Among other things, Todd talks about how security and privacy needs to baked into company processes, culture, and procedures. While security has always been important, the issue has accelerated greatly in the last five years. Staying in front of the changes requires the company to have the issue front and center and ongoing processes to test their own systems. Third-party systems should be in place to continually adjust and have continual formal improvement baked into everything you do.

Bottom Line

One of the biggest benefits of working with an Employer of Record (EOR) like PayReel is that we’ve already built the infrastructure to follow all of the above recommendations. We protect clients’ resources, contracts, and data at all times with multi-leveled security systems.

Hey, you can let your PR company keep you in the news for good reasons. At PayReel, we specialize in keeping you out of the headlines you don’t want to be saddled with. Bottom line: You better check yourself before you wreck yourself and also have partners in place to help you.

The post If You Hire a Contingent Workforce, Security MUST be a Top Priority appeared first on PayReel .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Video Marketing: Three Strategies to Master And One Myth to Bust

CMMA Blog

What’s the most common advice you’ve heard regarding consumer behavior when watching videos online? Hold on to that bit of so-called wisdom for a moment because we’ll come back to it. In the meantime, let’s talk about three strategies to level up your video marketing efforts.

Three Strategies to Engage Customers

Personalized Videos

My lender sent me a personalized video (PV) recently to celebrate my mortgage anniversary. My husband and I did not bake a cake or make a Champagne toast to celebrate the occasion. I wouldn’t have even known to mark the day without the reminder. But you know what? They took an otherwise benign moment and prompted me to consider the memories our family has made and the milestones we’ve marked in our home. I watched the whole video and felt all the warm and fuzzies while I was at it! Definitely not what I expected.

Even though I know there was not someone on the other end of that interaction who thought of me personally, it still created a sense of connection. In a world with endless impersonal emails and information rushing at us through all our screens, customers are looking for connection. They want to feel some sense of being understood or known and personalized videos can make them feel seen and important to your business. At the very least, it sets you apart from all the other generic messages your target audience gets flooded with every day.

Increase Production Quality

Video technology is quickly advancing and there are certainly occasions where a full crew and post-production team are the best way to accomplish your goals, but in this case, I’m not talking about that kind of production quality.

The combination of social media and our years of working from home and seeing people’s home offices through our screens have changed what’s acceptable. Some big brands are foregoing the full-fledged light kits and 8K production quality cameras for ring lights, a tripod, and a phone.

These intimate, down-to-earth videos often accomplish a different goal than a fully-produced product. Plenty of people have made a company announcement or described a course or product from their home office and come across as professional and worthy of trust.

So when we say you should increase your production value, it’s not necessarily about hiring a Hollywood-level team, but you also don’t want to make people motion sick. Just take the time to master basic shot composition, use a nice ring light, have your face fill most of the screen, and use a tripod or a stabilizer if you’re on the move.

Focus on Values

Customers are increasingly interested in supporting companies that reflect their values. Note Patagonia’s recent headline-making news  and the good will/proclamations of loyalty it garnered among consumers. If they have the options, workers and consumers alike are more likely to pick a company that aligns with their own values, whether those are work/life balance, sustainability, or a commitment to human rights. In an increasingly impersonal world, consumers want to feel like they can feel good about who they are doing business with.

Here’s what’s really fun: Videos don’t even have to be directly related to your business to engage consumers and even make them more loyal to you. Patagonia’s current series, called Working Knowledge , is “a new series of stories grounded in wild places and activism.” I don’t see anything about outdoor gear in that description, but it does communicate Patagonia’s values and engages customers who hold the same ones.

For many video marketing goals, such as this kind of cinematic storytelling, you really do need a professional crew to do it well. You need a director of photography who can execute powerful and cinematic shots, a soundtrack that inspires, an editor who understands the emotional impact of a perfect cut, and the producer who can put it all together. This is where the money you invest in a professional crew will be worth every penny.

Let’s Bust That Myth, Shall We?

Okay, what is the bit of wisdom that comes to mind when you hear what consumers are looking for in a video? Here’s mine: the shorter the video, the better. Your video should be three minutes tops and 30 seconds really is ideal. You know what, if you can say everything in 15 seconds, that’s even better. People’s measly attention spans can’t handle the long-form videos anymore.

Well, it turns out that studies are now showing that’s not true! We are not only capable of watching longer videos (yes, even online!), but we can actually be really interested in that video. Let’s go back to Patagonia because they have a reputation for doing this so incredibly well. They’ve been putting together stunning long-form videos  for years. They’ve used the longer-form videos to tell a story and take viewers on a journey where they sense the purpose of the brand. The incredible thing is that they aren’t talking about the brand at all. But they accomplish a true feat in making viewers feel something. They get inspired by a greater cause or feel compelled to head out into nature (for which they might need some gear, but whatever).

The Bottom Line

If you aren’t thinking about your video marketing, you really should be. Personalizing videos, creating a product that is easy to watch (whether professionally-produced or more casual), and connecting with a viewer’s values will help you level up your video marketing efforts. And don’t be shy about long videos because your viewers aren’t shying away from watching them (as long as they’re worth watching).

The post Video Marketing: Three Strategies to Master And One Myth to Bust appeared first on PayReel .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Webinar Recap: Employee Connectivity in Healthcare and Beyond

CMMA Blog

Webinar Recap: Employee Connectivity in Healthcare and Beyond

During our recent webinar Employee Connectivity in Healthcare and Beyond: Scaling Live Events to a Hybrid Workforce , a panel of experts from Microsoft, Kollective, and Children’s Mercy Hospital, had a roundtable discussion about how the pandemic and now hybrid work has transformed communications and collaboration. They reviewed the challenges faced by communications teams and network administrators when connecting a hybrid workplace with live events and covered strategies to build more inclusive communications. Learn how Kollective and Microsoft are working together to provide Healthcare companies with innovative solutions that address the needs of the modern workplace.

Panelists:

  • Host – Carson Heady – Microsoft, Director, Health Solutions – U.S. Health & Life Sciences
  • Matt Sims – Microsoft, Senior Customer Success Manager, Modern Communications – U.S. Health and Life Sciences
  • PJ Hartzell – Multi-media Content Producer at Children’s Mercy Hospital
  • Garrett Gladden – Kollective, V.P. of Product
  • Neal Lauther – Kollective, V.P. Global Technical Solutions

The Evolving Modern Workplace

The modern workplace has been reimagined. Hybrid and flexible work models have brought video to the forefront, making it the primary medium that businesses use to communicate and collaborate. Video’s growth in the enterprise has been significant. In July 2022 alone, Kollective delivered Teams Live Events to over 1.7 million viewers – a 15x increase in one year!
Microsoft Teams Growth

New Challenges

Since the pandemic, businesses have been confronted with new challenges when using live events to connect their distributed workforce. Neal Lauther, V.P. Global Technical Solutions at Kollective, identified three areas where they occur:

Running Events – Equipping yourself with the right tools is key to running successful live events.  Event producers and network administrators need to be laser focused on their objectives and properly prepared for events, regardless of their size. A few of the questions that need to be addressed before running an event include: Where are presenters connecting from? What kind of equipment do they have? What kind of content are they presenting? Are they familiar with the technology so they can run the event? These are just a few of the questions that need to be addressed prior to an event.

Delivering Events – Live events are now a preferred medium businesses use to deliver critical messaging. If an event fails and the messages don’t land, that is a problem for leadership and employees. Understanding where viewers are connecting from, if they are connecting remotely through a VPN, and if your network has the capacity to deliver content to those accessing it from the office, are a few of the considerations that need to be considered before running a live event.

Analyzing Events – Robust live event analytics are key to understanding how well an event performed. Having the data to prove whether employees were engaged, whether the event reached all necessary parties, and whether the quality was high, helps teams understand if there are issues that need to be addressed to ensure a better run during the next event.

Modern Collaboration Tools

To tackle these new communications challenges, modern tools are needed. Matt Sims, Senior Customer Success Manager, Modern Communications – U.S. Health and Life Sciences at Microsoft, described how Teams Live Events address these issues:

  • An advanced yet familiar producer experience to manage content and speakers
  • Scalability to support up to 10,000 attendees with options to support up to 100,000 view-only participants with the help of an ECDN
  • Support for asynchronous collaboration and consumption with VoD via Yammer and Stream
  • Built-in event analytics and the ability to integrate with an ECDN like Kollective for expanded insights to understand how people are connecting, where they are connecting from, and the quality of their experience

“The very clear design intent with Teams Live Events is to commoditize the toolkit for content creation, delivery and then consumption.”
– Matt Sims – Microsoft, Senior Customer Success Manager, Modern Communications – U.S. Health and Life Sciences

Emerging Content Delivery Challenges

The increased use of live events and hybrid work has led to delivery challenges and creative network solutions that have risen in response.

Network Complexity

In the modern hospital, there is a vast array of devices connecting to networks delivering critical and sensitive information. Oftentimes, sophisticated networks like these present hurdles when trying to deliver live events. There are numerous concerns to consider to understand how network complexity may impact deliverability:

  • Wireless networks – their design can be complex like tunneled or bridge connections
  • Devices can connect but where does that traffic go? Does it connect to a data center?
  • Users connecting from their workstation – is it wired or wireless, what kind of device are they using, and how is traffic being routed?
  • Remote users – are they using a company device or their own, are they secure, can they directly access cloud services, or do they need a VPN?

These challenges need to be understood and addressed before running live events. Many organizations are modernizing their network topology to embrace cloud services and allow users to connect from any location.

Security Standards

Matt Sims has found that security comes into every conversation he has with customers. To address these concerns, Microsoft Teams has security built-in from the ground layer. Taking a Zero Trust approach to security, Microsoft uses an identity-based security model with Azure Active Directory. This lends itself well to hybrid work, ensuring that one’s data and device are secure no matter where or how they connect. Explore Security and Microsoft Teams to understand how Teams follows security best practices and procedures.

SASE Environments

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is an emerging way of modernizing networks to support the hybrid workplace. Neal Lauther explained that the old way of setting up corporate networks does not consider the needs of modern workplace (e.g. addressing network complexity and security postures). Security is front and center with SASE and it meets high-security needs in a manner that is easy to turn on. It also provides networking policy and governance to cover the multiple ways hybrid and remote workers access content.
Kollective SASE

Kollective ECDN, as part of a SASE environment, delivers in the face of these network challenges by adapting to where the user is whether that is a VPN or a cluster location.

“Flawless live events, clear messages delivered, no impact to other critical services. That’s the goal.”
– Neal Lauther – Kollective, V.P. Global Technical Solutions

Inclusive Communications

Ensuring that every employee has equal access to high-quality live video is one of the primary concerns in the hybrid office. Whether employees are viewing a live event from the office, home, or a coffee shop, the event’s success depends on whether each attendee experienced a flawless, uninterrupted stream.

Reaching Every Employee

PJ Hartzell knows that reaching every employee in a hospital setting with live events has never been more important. At Children’s Mercy Hospital, the production team works with internal communications to execute a plan for upcoming events to ensure high in-person attendance for the event. For those unable to attend the event in-person, the production team immediately uploads the video to Microsoft Stream and notifies the organization that the event is available to view on-demand. Offering synchronous and asynchronous communications ensures that messaging gets to those who need it when and where they can access it.

Return to Office & Hybrid Work Planning

The modern workplace is continuously flexing to meet the needs of employees and businesses alike. To support companies shifting to hybrid work, Microsoft’s Work Lab has developed a series of guides called How to Hybrid that focus on the non-technological considerations of the return to office and hybrid work planning.

“We’re still working through all of these new challenges which are pretty exciting because it feels like we’re reengineering what we want work to be like for this new era.” – Matt Sims – Microsoft, Senior Customer Success Manager, Modern Communications – U.S. Health and Life Sciences

Collaborating With Stakeholders

Leadership is utilizing live events due to the simplicity and effectiveness of getting a message to land across a large group. Neal Lauther has noticed, “The ease has created the need.” Events are so easy to set up when the right systems are in place that they are shortening in duration and increasing in frequency.”

Children’s Mercy Hospital has seen a strong adoption of live events for one-to-many communications from the highest levels. Their CEO began a series during the pandemic called Live Connects to present information from high-level meetings to a broader audience to keep leadership in touch with the workforce.

Resources

Scaling Live Events Checklist – Download this checklist to develop an effective and measurable plan to scale live events to a hybrid workforce.

Microsoft Live Events Assistance Program – A free service offered to Enterprise customers that provides basic training as well as technical and non-technical consideration of how to run successful Teams Live Events

Microsoft Workshops – Microsoft Teams training to help employees connect in a hybrid workplace.

Kollective Free Trial – Start a 30-day free trial of Kollective ECDN in just six clicks to begin scaling Teams Live Events.

The post Webinar Recap: Employee Connectivity in Healthcare and Beyond appeared first on Kollective Technology .

To view our Partner blog, click here