Toast's week in Tweets

Here’s the first of the weekly Twitter round-ups brought to you by Toast TV, featuring the most popular Tweets that we’ve posted over the past five working days.

Thinking of making a business video? Here's a guide from @MarketingB2B. Send us any questions for our production team! http://awe.sm/5r0Bl

B2B Marketing wrote a great guide for businesses on making a successful video production. So, we thought that we’d add our own two cents and upload our ‘Things to think about before making a video production’ guide to our blog. You can read it here.

According to @klout ToastTV is a social media 'Specialist'. We have a rating of 47! #socialmediagurus

We were extremely pleased to discover that our Klout rating has reached 47. This means that more of you are joining us on our social media portals, and we’re influencing what you think about social media and television. They even went so far as to call us a ‘Specialists’.

A big congratulations to The Big Issue on its 1000th issue! Read what TBI's editor had to say here - http://awe.sm/5qL7u @bigissue

It was a seminal moment for homeless charity The Big Issue team as they reached their 1000th issue. So, we sent them a big congratulations for all of their hard work. Click here to donate to this worthy cause.

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Keep up to date with our Tweets by subscribing to our RSS feed in the top right hand corner of the blog, or join us directly on Twitter.

Stock footage tips

Researching stock footage for a corporate video or a television commercial can be a long-winded and sometimes fruitless process. It’s very difficult to get it right the first time around. Particularly as there are far too many sites to get through and the correct search terms aren’t always obvious. So, thought we’d run you through some approaches that we’ve picked up here at Toast. 

First off, do a bit of research and write a list of the search terms that you think are suitable. Then methodically run through them on your chosen selection of stock footage sites. It sounds simple, but if you don’t do your research on the terms and run through your results in a constructed way, then you’ll end up missing out on potentially useful clips and just end up browsing.

If this straightforward approach isn’t working, look at how you can make your search terms wider or narrower in order to expand or contract your results. A good start is to look at synonyms of the words that you are using, in case you’ve missed something out.

If you’re still stuck for ideas, run an Internet image search on your keywords and see what comes up. Let’s say you’re looking for skyscrapers under construction, perhaps there’s a skyscraper that’s due for completion in the next few months. Run a search on its name, architect and surrounding area. Chances are that someone has covered it recently, because skyscrapers tend to be newsworthy.

This is the point where you might well want to call the stock footage company, an expert, your client, or a friend who works in the field for more information about the search that you’re conducting. For example, if you’re making a film about specific types of flowers, they may be able to advise you on places where you can find these flowers. It sounds odd, but even just asking the person sitting at the desk next to you might give you some new ideas for related search terms.

Keep up to date with our video production tips, news and analysis by subscribing to our RSS feed in the top right hand corner, or join us on Twitter and Facebook.

Further resources

GettyImages.com

ClipCanvas.com

SciencePhoto.com

Pond5.com

BPVideoLibrary.com

IVCA Awards winners 2012

Toast would like to congratulate this year's fantastic set of IVCA Award winners. The bar was set very high and our expectations were exceeded. Best charity piece winner, Luke’s world, was a particularly moving piece produced for the Private Equity Foundation. The short film is about living entirely on benefits and opened our eyes to the reality of growing up in childhood poverty.